Bahut Accha

You can't exactly dress in your typical clothing when in India. Primarily because you would be much too hot. You would also really stand out, and if you were a woman, you'd appear immodest. It is best then, to dress in Indian clothing. I already own a lot of Indian clothing that I brought with me, but having been on the road for a while now I required either new clothes or laundry. My first choice was new clothes.

When one want to buy clothes in India, it is possible to do as you would do in the USA and go to a store, but it's much more fun to go to a fabric store, haggle for fabric and then take your purchases to a tailor to get something custom-made. This of course, is a several hours long process. Yesterday I ventured out with a few other girls (who speak better Hindi than I do) and for around ten US dollars ordered myself a snazzy new salwar kameez suit (basically puffy pirate pants, a medieval-looking tunic, and a modest scarf to cover your boobs.) Both the fabric store and the tailor are contained in shops about 10 square feet large open to the hot Jaipur air with at least two or three men working there to argumentatively hover over you for the entirety of your transaction. Pictured below, a few of my friends are at the counter for the tailor. The sign above the store says "Nisha Ladies Tailors."As my new clothes will not be ready for a week or so, I also had to do laundry. I could have forked out the forty cents or so that it would have cost to have my laundry done at the Gem Inn, but I opted instead to buy some laundry soap and attempt the task myself. I have yet to decide weather or not this was the right decision as the floor of my bathroom is now flooded, my clothes are all wet with few places to hang, and they may or may not actually be clean. Every Indian bathroom is equipped with at least a few plastic buckets (serving various purposes) and only when I started the clothes-washing process did I discover that there's quite literally, a hole in my bucket.

In other news about my bathroom, I discovered yesterday in a very surprising accident that my toilet has a bidet function.

My Hindi is certainly improving being here, but I am still in that phase of language-acquisition where one must feel like a small child a lot of the time. I sound out words very slowly when attempting to read, I speak only in sentences of less than five words, and the most challenging part of my school work today was learning THIS nursery rhyme about a fish. मचली जल की रानी है... So at least for now, there are plenty more embarrassing, cultureclashtastic stories to come.