It has been a week since I last posted, and I know that makes me a bad blogger (a bad person?), but I’d rather live life than write about it. Sorry, Cregan.
Life here got very busy very fast. Monday, we started classes, so we’re at the school from 8 am to maybe 6:30 at night (sometimes 4:30). Long, long days. Here’s what my life typically looks like:
-7:00 Wake up, shower, clean my room/make my bed (shocking, I’m well aware). Then there’s the morning cup of chai (chaha in Marathi), and the rickshaw ride to school. After a couple days, we finally mastered how to tell the driver our stop so we don’t have to run all over the place.
-8:00 Breakfast (all thirty of us together in the program center, plus the staff, all lounging about) and more chai. We once had high hopes of getting some internet time in there, but evidently internet at the center doesn’t get turned on until 10. Sigh.
-9:00-10:00 Hindi! The hardest class I’m taking by far—that’s one complicated language. Like 12 vowels, 27 consonants, and many, many nazal, palatal, and aspirated sounds. I can’t tell most of them apart when they’re spoken, or say them, but I’m trying. PLUS SIDE: I took a strenuous evening studying and now I can read! I have no idea what anything says, and I sound a bit like a 4 year-old, but at least I’m literate. Success.
-10:15-1:15 Various classes. Contemporary India (mandatory, but really interesting class on Indian development and structure and issues and all that); Public Health (our teacher has a PhD in human sexuality, and he’s amazing); and Social Justice (I wasn’t going to take this, and I really shouldn’t, but it’s all going to be about caste and gender, and the teacher is a totally badass, revolutionary feminist. I couldn’t resist.)
-Lunch! Always an adventure.
-2:30-4:30 (or 6:30) More class. Research Methods. Meh. But it’s only for a month or two, and then we start our internships. Which are really research projects. BUT I did get my teacher to essentially promise me that I get to do research in sexual health of Pune sex workers. I’M SO EXCITED.
The rest of my life is quite taken. Walk home (get stared at really awkwardly in my whiteness and almost but never really get hit by cars, scooters, bikes, rickshaws, and dogs), hang with my host family, eat way too much food, do homework, sleep, do it all over again.
Thus far, weekends have been similarly packed. This morning, Anna and I went shopping with a bunch of people from our program on Laxmi Road, this great street packed with stores of all sorts, as well as markets and outdoor stalls and all sorts of stuff. My mission is to immerse as totally as I can into the traditional Indian fashion scene, so today I got a couple kurtas (those long tunicky shirts) and the fabric for a salwar kameez (which includes top, pants, and scarf that all have much more Indian names). That’s one of the magical features of India: tailoring is omnipresent here. You can just go into anywhere that does stitching, which seems to be everywhere, and pick from a big book of designs for every possible style of clothing, and they’ll make it for you. Cheap. Plus, a lot of stores do tailoring on their own clothes FOR FREE so that they can fit perfectly. It’s really a wonderful concept.
Okay, I really need to sleep. Tomorrow morning I have to get up at 7 because we’re trekking to some fort and hanging there all day. It should be…historical. Good to get out, though. Beyond the probably 5 miles we walked today, we never really get too much exercise. Hopefully, we can change that soon (I need to find me some yoga!). So for now, I’ll just sleep. But forthcoming is a post about my musings on my cultural upheaval. I need this chronicled, because my daily life really isn’t interesting. Or informative. I might have gotten it, but y’all really have yet to meet India. I’ll do my best to change that.
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