I promise not to be so long on the updates again, but I updated pictures a while ago, and I thought that could hold you over until I got the chance to write out what all I’ve been doing over the past month. I don’t think I’ll ever wait this long again, mostly because there’s so much to talk about, but also because I’m sure I’m going to forget something in all the time that’s passed. But what I can remember, I pass on to you.
So first, an amusing anecdote: since we had the day off on October 2nd for Gandhi’s Birthday, a fellow student and I decided that we wanted to go to a local café, to finish up work for the week and generally be good students. We might have sort of forgotten that it was Gandhi’s birthday, and thus hilarity ensued. First, we asked like four autorickshaws to transport us across town, which usually only costs us like 40 rupees, but we couldn’t get a better price than 50. Whatever, we really wanted to go, it was only ten more rupees, it’s fine. So we get to the café, and it’s closed. Great. The other student knows of another café, but he doesn’t know how close it is, so we ask for it and we get quoted 40 rupees. We should have known better than to take the first price, but we didn’t know how far away it was, and we wanted our caffeine, so we did it. The place couldn’t have been more than a two minute ride away (re: 20 rupees, give or take), so we overpay like hell. Whatever, now we have our caffeine. So we study, and we drink coffee, and we eat brownies, and now we’re ready to go. It should be about a 40-60 rupee ride back home, so we quiz all the autos outside the café, and I have a conversation (in Hindi) that goes something like this:
Me: I’m going to Raja Park.
Him: Raja Park.
Me: Yes, you know it?
Him: [short pause] Yes.
Me: What is the price?
Him: 40 rupees.
My mistake, of course, for the second time that day, was not being suspicious of a decent price. We get into the auto, and take a minute long ride – it *had* to be under a kilometer – and he points at a hotel whose name I can’t remember, but the first word, of course, is Raja, and the second word starts with a P. I facepalm. I literally slap my palm to my forehead. What follows is a seven minute conversation about how I said Raja Park, I didn’t say this place, he knows I said Raja Park, and how he knows that 40 isn’t a good price for this place and how we’re at most giving him twenty for his trouble. He, of course, comes back with something like “Fine, this isn’t where you want to go, then give me 100 rupees and I’ll take you to Raja Park.” And we were like “You have to be completely insane to think we’re giving you 140 rupees because you messed up.” So eventually, we agreed to pay him 20 for the ride to the hotel, and 50 for the ride back to Raja Park, because the other student was feeling generous, and there weren’t really any other autos in sight. All in all, we paid him 80, because the other student for some reason felt like this driver deserved another ten rupees for trying to rip us off more than once. But, to be fair, we did get home, and I did vow never to spend that much on autos in a day again. Lesson learned, I guess.
Less funny, and particularly exciting: We had a break for Diwali recently, and three other students and I decided we wanted to go to Darjeeling. One of the students had studied in Kolkata for a year, and wanted to visit a friend there while we were in that part of the country; she was able to secure us free lodging for our time in Kolkata, which was pretty wonderful. So Saturday the 10th, after our field trip to Jawahar Kala Kendra (JKK) and Albert Hall (there are pictures), we went to the airport, hopped on a plane, and arrived in Kolkata late that evening.
If I thought that Jaipur was a pretty big city, I was entirely mistaken. Kolkata is like New York to Jaipur’s Cincinnati: sure, it seems big when you haven’t seen anything else. I’m half-convinced that like New York, Kolkata doesn’t sleep, as there are people everywhere all the time. (This includes nosey neighbors, which are kind of useful for helping you find where you’re staying when you know you’re on the right street but can’t find the right doorway.) It’s also very dusty; at times, it actually felt difficult to breathe. Anyway, we spent most of our time in Kolkata in various restaurants that the student who had stayed here remembered, including a particularly delicious Italian restaurant with homemade sauce for their real-pepperoni pizza. We also got to go to a huge Oxford bookstore, at least relative to the one in Jaipur, where I spent entirely too much money on books like Milton’s Paradise Lost, Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Suleri’s The Rhetoric of English India, and Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, among others. The last thing we did before leaving for Darjeeling was visit our host’s current pet project, a fair trade organization called Freeset (freesetglobal.com) which allows women from the sex trade to get training and employment in another profession along with decent wages, free healthcare, and free childcare. It was a pretty cool place, and kind of makes me want to do something similar, at least for a little while. I don’t know that I could live in Kolkata, though.
Traveling to Darjeeling, the first leg by Non-AC Sleeper car train, the second by tiny oh-god-please-don’t-fall-off-the-mountain car, was kind of intense. Not sure I could do the train by myself, mostly because of the creeper who was across the way and one bunk down from me and kept staring at me and generally treating me like a piece of meat when he needed something, despite the fact that his wife and kid were in a bunk nearby. (Not sure I’ll ever get used to the treatment of women here, nor am I sure that I should have to, but that’s a topic for another post.) But Darjeeling… Darjeeling was beautiful, what I got to see of it. I got to enjoy the first day we were there, walking around by myself for a bit and trying new things with the group like butter tea (ew) and momos (kind of tasty) and hot toddys (I could really take it or leave it). The next day, though, I woke up, had breakfast, and pretty much went straight back to the hotel and the bed, where I slept off my high fever for the next 8 hours or so. (I have no idea what it was, but the saga still continues on that front.) The next morning, I was able to see the sun rise and hit the Himalayas while Buddhist monks chanted in the day, which may have been the coolest thing I’ve done ever (and there are pictures!). This was followed by a trip to the lovely Sri Mahakal Mandir, a temple absolutely covered in prayer flags, and then a (stupid) hike (for just having recovered from a fever) to the Tibetan Refugee Self-Help Center, where I started feeling ill beyond words again. Ended up going back to the hotel and sleeping until our taxi came to pick us up for the train to Kolkata, where I ended up spending the last day of the trip sleeping off my illness (again). Being sick three days out of a seven day trip is not what I’d call fun, but I enjoyed the trip, if I was a little starved for alone time by the end of it.
We got back Diwali morning, and spent the rest of the day in various states of unpacking and arguing with our landlady (more on that in a second). That evening, though, we went to a flat a few students are living in and got to watch the fireworks from the roof. For those of you that don’t know, Diwali is a holiday that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The story I’d heard before coming here was that you lit lamps and fireworks in order to show Ram and Sita the way home from their crazy adventure. (Remember? Ram and Hanuman fought (and exploded) Ravana to win back Sita on Dusshera?) The story I heard while here was that the fireworks attracted Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity, to your home for the new year. I’m not sure which was correct, but the fireworks started at 6pm and didn’t end until well after 2am. It was kind of like living in a war zone, with all the explosions going on, and walking down the street you had to pay attention because grandfathers/small children/anyone who was brave enough to pick up a lighter was lighting and sending up or tossing fireworks into the street with no real regard to where things were going. It was beautiful, fun, and also a little scary, and two weeks later, we still see firework remnants in the streets.
As to our landlady, it seems that in our absence she booked our rooms for a wedding party. Now I don’t know much about Indian laws, but if I’ve paid rent for the month, I’m pretty sure you can’t turn around and sell my room to someone else, especially not if there are other open rooms or an entire open floor for you to put them in. Also, wouldn’t you want to please the people who are going to be paying you rent for the next six months rather than the next two days? Regardless, she tried to make us move in with each other or move out for two days while the wedding party came in and tore the place up. I kind of wish I would have moved for those days; I didn’t mind having a roommate because I knew that was temporary, but the wedding party ended up partying until 2am on a school night one of the evenings they stayed, and that was kind of annoying. I kind of want to move out – there’s another wedding party coming in the next month, and the internet here is occasionally shoddy, and I’m paying to not be bothered by these things, so I should get the choice. I also desperately want to be able to cook for myself, as half the time, I don’t like the food they serve here, and the other half of the time, I want to be able to store things in the refrigerator or get filtered water whenever I want. But moving at this point is kind of hard, as the people I’d want to move in with are leaving the program in December, and then I’d probably be back at this same place afterwards. When other folks leave, we’ll see what kind of openings there are, and whether or not other people want to move from their lodgings.
So yeah. Getting kind of sick of the food here. I’d like it more, except that half the time, they throw random peppers and onions and tomatoes into the dish, which is fine except that I’m a texture eater and each of those textures kind of makes me want to vomit, and really, I’ve been doing enough of that recently. I totally believe that health is directly related to what you eat, mostly because I’ve been eating fairly unbalanced meals: always heavy on the carbs, and not nearly enough green or protein-y things. I should eat differently, and I swear I try new things every day, but sometimes I can’t bring myself to finish them, even if I only grabbed a little bit. As such, my health has been crap, leading not only to stomach disturbances but to that weird fever thing, weird stiff joints, overly swollen lymph nodes, and a rash that covered my entire body for no apparent reason. I went to the doctor, who gave me orders for a blood test and prescribed me general antibiotics. The blood test seemed normal beyond a ridiculously low white blood cell count, which yes, can occur during illness, but I’ve recently begun to wonder whether or not it’s more common than that for me, given how often I get sick. I’m thinking about getting tested for auto-immune deficiencies soon, so we’ll see how that goes.
I’ve also sort of hit a wall with Hindi. Yes, I’m getting better, and yes, I’ve only been here for two months, and yes, it is my first time in India, and yes, I feel the need to be social in order to have at least some friends here, but I feel like I should be doing better than I am. I can be a procrastinator and a perfectionist at the same time apparently. So I’ve decided to try to work on the procrastination bit and kick my Hindi learning up a couple notches. It’s worked well so far – I’ve been sticking to my schedule for the most part, learning a set number of new words a day and spending so many hours on Hindi outside the classroom, be it watching a movie, studying pronunciation, doing homework, or visiting a local tailor, a friend of a friend’s and someone who enjoys speaking with students. I haven’t really seen any results yet (besides the new word retention, which is working out splendidly), but I’m hoping this will make me feel better about the effort I’m putting in, even if I don’t see anything out of it for the next month or so. We’ll see how it goes.
So yes, things are kind of crazy here, but I’m generally happy about life. There are moments everyday where I smile and laugh, and most importantly, I think, Hindi is still really interesting to me. I’m not really sure I could ask for anything more. Except for maybe more hours in the day, but who doesn’t wish for that?
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