Saf Nahi Hai.

Language acquisition is a strange thing. How did I ever learn the difference between the words this, that, these, and those when learning to speak English when the Hindi equivalents, यह, वह, ये, and वे are a mind-boggling, daily torment to me?

I'll withhold the urge to tell you how I feel about prepositions.

I've been in class here for about two weeks. Prior to this program I had had one semester of Hindi which was last year when I was abroad in Hyderabad. I recall learning a lot and feeling pretty successful in the class; unfortunately, in the year between then and now I seem to have forgotten everything. It was for this reason that I felt it would be fine for me to start anew as a beginner Hindi student. It only took a few days for the language to start coming back to me, however. Suddenly I could remember random bits of vocabulary, various rules on verb conjugation, and even those damn prepositions. My beginner classes began to seem too slow. The issue then, was that most of the students in the intermediate class had had at least a year of Hindi study and unlike me, they remember all of the things they've been taught. I found myself in limbo straddling the boundary between beginner and intermediate and my professor suggested I give intermediate a try. "Challenge yourself," he said.

At the risk of brain aneurysm I took his suggestion and have been sitting in on the intermediate classes this week. While in beginner I was applauded for properly counting to ten, in intermediate I get eyes rolled at me for not having memorized the past-progressive tense second-person conjugation of the verb, होना, "to be." "Saf hai? Saf hai?" (clear? clear?) the teachers keep asking me after rattling off an hour-long lesson in rapid Hindi. "uhhh...kyaa?" I'm holding out on the hope that I will miraculously wake up fluent one of these mornings and waltz into class reciting prose from the Bhagavad Gita. Until that day, say a prayer from my brain's left hemisphere.
All wound-up with Hindi Grammar Anxiety, I decided to seek some spiritual cleansing today at a yoga ashram. One of my fellow students found a little yoga center down the street and told me about it and today after class I ventured there on my own. It looked strikingly like the yoga center at the University of Hyderabad where I did my rigorous five-days-a-week-at-6am yoga course last year. Hard floors, rickety ceiling fans, weird charts and paintings on the walls, and not a designer yoga mat or lululemon logo anywhere in sight.
When I entered the building I was beckoned into a dark office where a very old man and woman asked me questions about myself in broken English before finally showing me to the yoga room. There, I sat down on the wool blanket-covered floor as a few more students trickled in. The class ended up being a few middle-aged women, a very old man, myself, and a little girl who looked to be about 8 and thought the sight of me was hilarious. This is unlike my class in Hyderabad where I was one of the only women. Also unlike Hyderabad where I was taught by a large, hard-of-hearing old man (we called him "Old Man Yoga"), this teacher was a soft-spoken young woman.

In my experience, yoga in India bears only vague similarities to yoga in the USA, and this class was no exception. A few poses that the teacher wanted us to do were ones that my American teachers would tell you are sure ways to tear a roatator-cuff or hyperventilate. Regardless of the differences, I guess it was apparent that I know a bit about yoga. A few poses into class the teacher stopped, looked at me, and in a very surprised tone said, "You have practiced yoga very much before, no?" I told her, actually in the USA I am a yoga teacher too. A gasp from the room.

After class, the teacher called me over and asked me all kinds of questions about myself and about yoga in America. I told her about all of the time I have spent in India and she asked why my Hindi was so bad. Regardless of my obvious awkwardness and terrible Hindi skills she repeatedly insisted that I must come back to the ashram to teach a yoga class.

On my way out another old man appeared from the woodwork to call me into another dark little office to have me sign my name on some papers with questions like "are you unmarried?" and "What is your father's name?" After this, he sold me a monthly membership (I didn't ask for this, but I don't think he would have taken no for an answer). He stared at me intently through his inch-thick lenses as his younger counterpart pointed out that I hold my pen very strangely. Then the three of us sat silently for a long time waiting to see if there was anything else to be said. Finally, the bespectacled man told me very certainly that "Tomorrow you are came again at 5:30!"

Dare I?

Cultureclashtastic: Jungle Safari

"India has a large variety of wild animals, a number of which may be considered 'big game' from the point of view of a sportsman with a rifle, and for the increasing number of those who hunt only with a camera there are, besides these, smaller animals such as reptiles and countless birds which furnish an inexhaustible supply of subjects for photography" The Handbook of India, 1958A friend of mine in the program here is a girl named Jennie who just happens to be a PhD student at the Yale School of Forestry and her main area of research just happens to be tigers. As soon as I learned this about her I made clear that she must alert me if ever she was going to seek out some tigers this summer. I was not the only one of the students here to come up with that idea, so it wasn't long before Jessica, Stephanie, Heeryoon, Devin, and I all found ourselves tagging along with Jennie on an Indian Jungle safari in Ranthambhore National Park, just a few hours south of Jaipur.

We left Jaipur on Friday evening and arrived late that night to the "Hotel Tiger Safari Resort." The HTSR was a nice place with a lot of character; it featured tacky paintings of tigers on every available surface which could only be outdone in loudness by the tiger-print curtains. After a night of tiger-striped dreams and sleeplessness due to pre-tiger excitement, we woke up at 5am for our 6am safari.

The six of us loaded into a jeep-like vehicle accompanied by a driver and a guide. As soon as we approached the park entrance I immediately had the opportunity to embarrass my travel companions as our car was swarmed by souvenir sellers--my friends shooed them away as I beckoned them closer to buy an army-green Ranthambhore baseball cap which I insisted on wearing in public for the remainder of our trip to everyone's dismay.We began down the bumpy, dirt road at speeds reckless enough to make me legitimately concerned about being ejected from the vehicle (no roof, no seat-belts, nothing to hold onto). It was much like the Indiana Jones Ride at Disneyland, except real and totally unsafe. Our first hour or so in the park was somewhat uneventful other than the moment when I felt an itch only to realize a gecko was crawling up my leg and began wildly screaming. We saw any number of beautiful birds, some deer, and some nice scenery, but our chances of actually seeing a tiger seemed to be narrowing as it got later and the sun got hotter. And then, tiger tracks in the mud, birds making distress calls, and another half-hour of nothing. And then, TIGER!!!

Our vehicle, and about five others, suddenly clustered on the road and just 100 feet up the hill a female tiger (possibly pregnant) lazily paced around in the trees. We were able to follow her along the road for a good half hour or so. Though we could see her very clearly, it turns out it is very difficult to photograph a tiger. That whole natural camouflage thing really works to my camera's disadvantage, and for some reason they didn't want us to get out of the car to walk closer.Eventually we had disturbed the tigress long enough that she decided to leave for more remote areas of the forest and we decided to leave for Ranthambhore Fort, a thousand year-old structure in the center of the park. Like most historic buildings in India, the fort was crawling with monkeys. The fort was beautiful, but by 9am after a long morning of safariing and fort climbing in the oppressive heat, we were more than ready to return to the hotel for food and napping.

In the afternoon, Jennie, Jessica and I wandered into the village around our hotel. Here, Jennie put aside her fashion sense and purchased the same hat I had bought that morning. She got her hat for less than half the price I paid for mine from a Hindi-speaking shopkeeper who asked why none of us (over-the-hill in our early/mid 20's) were married yet and told us that he was married at age 10. Shortly thereafter, the three of us created some kind of riot attempting to get our park passes for our evening safari, but all was resolved in the end. (Jennie and I are pictured in our matching hats in front of the tiger curtains in the hotel making our best Tiger Safari faces)

Our evening safari seemed almost superfluous after our adventurous morning, but this time we were going to a different part of the park and the different time of day would mean different animals. We loaded into the jeep for a second time. When we had been on the road for less than a minute, just about 20 feet inside the gate, we came upon an old ruined building. And inside the structure...a TIGER napping in the shade! She was close enough to walk 10 steps to (they didn't actually let us do this), but just far enough into the shadows to make photos a challenge once again.
When we eventually decided to leave tiger #2 alone, we carried on past some more monkeys. The monkeys, our guide told us, were staring at us because of our "punny white skin." With that, we moved on to see some birds. We stopped our vehicle next to a lake filled with storks and many other tropical birds cooling themselves off alongside a few herds of deer. As we sat observing birds and looking for crocodile noses peeking out of the water Jessica, an avid bird-lover, revealed a package of cookies she had brought along. It didn't take a tree-full of rufous treepies long to discover the crumbled cookies in our hands. As it happens, rufous treepies make really strange, electronic-sounding little chirps like little robot-birds. It was fun to feed the birds, but once the vehicle stopped moving and the wind was no longer in our faces, the heat and humidity became somewhat intense. So when all of our isolated sweat-patches had enlarged to whole-body dampness, we unanimously opted to leave the park having seen two tigers, several varieties of deer and antelope, dozens of monkeys, a few wild pigs, a really huge lizard, many tiny lizards, a rabbit, a few submerged crocodiles, and birds birds birds birds birds (eat your heart out, Rudyard Kipling).

Today we drove back. I uploaded my photos to discover I had taken nearly 200 in a single day-- The Handbook of India is at least accurate about the inexhaustible supply of photo subjects, it seems.

Tomorrow: back to class.

yahaa meri nayi kapade hai!

यहाँ मेरी नयी कापडें हैं !
Remember my trip to the tailor? I just picked up my new threads. Ta Da! Snazzy, no?
This weekend I am going on my first traveling adventure. I will be back to Jaipur on Sunday, hopefully with many exciting adventures to report, but you probably won't hear from me until then.

फिर मिलेंगे

vednesday adwentures

Yesterday we moved back to the Gem Inn and into the rooms that we will have permanently. I finally got to unpack my suitcase! My new room has a nicer view from the windows than my original room had, although the framed art, Egyptian Pharohs, just doesn't compare to my old ladies and camel picture. The new room also has a giant bed with a mattress that drastically redefines my idea of "firm." Taking a shower in my new bathroom, my eyes landed at a curious mark on the wall just at eye level. It only took me a moment to realize that the perfectly-shaped little dot was a stick-on bindi that the previous guest in this room, presumably an Indian woman, had removed and stuck to the wall of the shower for safekeeping. Only in India, eh?

I was beginning to regret the lack of exploring I've done around Jaipur thus far, having been carted back and forth between school and the inn every day without making too many stops for excursions. I felt a little reassured, however, when one of our teachers urged us to "awoid adwenturing" for at least a few days because of the heat. At 47 degrees Celcius (really hot), Jaipur has been experiencing a record-breaking heatwave that even the locals won't venture out in.

I got tired of that excuse pretty quickly though...

So after class today, in the company of my fellow student, Jennie, I explored M1 Road, a popular shopping area in the city. Everything in India is to a much smaller scale than it would be in the USA. This is partially due to the fact that they have 3 times the population in one third of the space and partially due to America's incurable "bigger is better" paradigm. Either way, the cool little book store where we started our shopping today could really only be called a book shelf by American standards, but it was a treasure-trove nonetheless.


From there, we visited Himalaya (pronounced he-MAH-la-ya) an Ayurvedic product store. At the end of a day in Jaipur, one's sweat, combined with dusty air and regular sunscreen applications leaves one's face badly in need of washing, so I purchased a tube of Ayurvedic face mud to attempt some deep-cleaning. For your entertainment, I offer you this picture of my first endeavor with Ayurvedic remedies:
Shopping done, I purchased a much-needed guava milkshake and hailed a rickshaw. A little haggling, a little of the rickshaw driver confessing his love for me, and a little high-speed driving got me back to the Gem just in time to procrastinate on my studying.

Cultureclashtastic: The Awkward Party Guest

I don't always understand what's going on around me here. This is part due to the fact that India is a confusing place, but mostly due to the fact that our instructors intentionally speak to us mostly in Hindi. So I can't tell you exactly why, but for some reason having to do with someone's wedding we all had to vacate the Gem Inn for two nights and relocate down the street to The Red Fox Hotel. Turns out the Red Fox is several stars above the Gem in terms of swank. Towels in the bathrooms and flat screen tvs and weird modern art and everything. But we'll return to our dingy, Gem home tomorrow.

I also can't tell you exactly why, but for some reason the owner of the Gem invited the 8 or so of us American students living there to go with him to the 25th wedding anniversary party of a friend of a friend of a friend of his...or something. In any case, last night, when the sun had gone down and the temperature had cooled to a nice 93, my fellow students and I found ourselves at a 300 person party awkwardly eating the food and wondering where we were and how we had gotten there. The Indians in attendance, presumably somehow connected to the celebrated couple, were all dressed in their most-sequined of saris and kurtas, while we uninvited guests were mostly clad in jeans and sweat-stained shirts. The music (American Hip-Hop of 10 years ago) was loud enough to inspire wild dancing among the crowd's teenage boy demographic, but before any of us worked up the bravery to join in, we decided instead to leave. An "eat-and-run" experience, as one of my friends explained.
Today, weekend parties behind us, we returned to school where I learned to confidently say such phrases as "There is a blue chair," or "I have two books." As you can see, I'll be well prepared to make riveting conversation at the next Indian family celebration that I find myself accidentally crashing.

In other news, I found out someone has already written and published this very blog so to speak. The program I am doing is the summer intensive version of what is usually a year-long program. A writer named Katherine Russell Rich apparently did this year-long program a few years back and has written a book about it. You all should read it and tell me about it and/or buy it for me to read:
CLICK HERE

the bizarre and the bazaar

Even the most disorganized American is used to a certain level of planning, orderliness, and efficiency--a standard that can make India a strange place to adjust to. Here, whatever happens happens and planning is typically a futile effort. Like yesterday when, after a hot day outside, I was looking forward to an air-conditioned nap and the electricity went out...making it a very sweaty nap instead. Or this morning, when midway through my shower, my water simply disappeared. Or when I had finally finished unpacking and moving into my room at the Gem and our program director suddenly announced, "oh by the way, the Gem is being used to host a huge wedding party so could you please all pack up so we can move you to a different hotel for a few days?" This is a great country to come to if you want to become a very flexible, patient person.

Another test of patience that somewhat inevitable in India is the infamous "Delhi Belly," an explosive kind of upset-stomach that only the most delicious curries can inspire. I found myself exploring the capabilities of my own digestive system yesterday, but I appear to be on the mend.
This is not to say I have not thoroughly been enjoying everything given to me to eat in the past week. The other day I ate a life-changing mango, I also ate fresh lychees for the first time, and yesterday I finally got my hands on my favorite Indian snack, chole bathure, a huge baloon of fried bread served with super-spicy chick peas. yum.
Yesterday, I also finally got into the old city section of Jaipur. We took an elementary school style field trip to Bapu Bazaar (pictured at the top), one of Jaipur's most famous attractions. It is a huge outdoor market with several city blocks of pink covered walkways under which you can find just about anything you might want to buy (if you're willing to get into a serious bargaining battle with the shopkeepers). I didn't buy anything this time, but when I warm up my haggling skills a little more, I'm sure find an opportunity to go back to buy all of your souvenirs.

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.

two ladies and a camel

Mom complained that I hadn't put up another blog, but not too much has really happened thus far. In any kind of school program the first few days are generally designated for the tedious logistical and organizational things that take a lot of time. In India, where organization and timeliness are foreign concepts, these first days of school take even longer. I remember this was a huge culture shock during my first days in Hyderabad last year. This time around I have a better understanding of how things work and I've been pretty content to just sit back and sip my chai for hours while I wait for my stars to align.

One issue that's been plaguing me for the past few days has been the (dis)organization of our housing assignments. I had thought I would be in a homestay for this program, but not everything is quite as it seemed it would be and it now looks like I'll be living in a strange and shabby little hotel called The Gem Inn. Of course, everything could change at any moment.

The homestay vs. hotel issue has all kinds of pros and cons, but the Gem does have air conditioning. I suppose I realized it was really hot when I stepped into my room from the 115 degree heat and the room felt icy cold with the thermostat set to 80.

The other major draw of The Gem is the picture of two sexy ladies and a camel hanging in my room which I am particularly fond of. It would be a pity to leave that behind.

Please excuse the incoherence. I'm very tired.

We were scheduled to fly from DC to Chicago to Delhi on Friday the 11th, it all seemed so simple back then...

We arrived to the DC airport Friday morning to general chaos--there were about 50 of us trying to check in all together (the 20 or so in my Jaipur program, and more students from other India programs). The airline employees were overwhelmed by the large number of us but were also trying to explain to us that we might miss our connection due to bad weather in Chicago. For the next four hours we ran amok throughout the DC airport trying to re-route 50 tickets to India. Eventually, after a hundred different rumors, it was declared that we could leave for India from Toronto on Saturday.

We returned to our fancy DC hotel, which thankfully still had room for us, then left again at 3am for a 6am flight to Toronto.

We made it to Toronto at about 7:30am and our flight to Delhi was scheduled to leave at 6:10pm. This is a very very long time to have to spend in the Toronto airport.

Under-slept, after nine hours of boredom, when my sanity was already seriously waning, we boarded the flight to Delhi, but I couldn't help but notice all of the announcements telling us that this flight was going to Brussels. I survived six hours next to a very large, shrill, Eastern European woman wrangling at least four screaming toddlers. And then all of the sudden I was in Belgium.

Ours happened to be one of those flights that makes two stops. The airline doesn't clearly mention to the Delhi passengers that they are going to have to spend two hours in Brussels in the middle of an already hellish journey. They obviously realize that people will be angry about this so right before landing, they play a 15 minute video explaining why Belgium is wonderful and you should really be honored to be there. "Brussels is not only a picturesque city, but it is also the capital of the EU! Marvel at Brussels airport's astonishing selection of fine Belgian chocolate! Brussels airport is often considered to be one of the world's finest!" So we all had to de-plane and go experience the miracles of the beautiful Brussels airport. I made the best of this strange predicament and found myself a waffle.

Waffled, refreshed, deliriously tired, I boarded the plane a second time to go to Delhi. The horrible family had left in Brussels only to be replaced by an obnoxious American man who snapped at all of the flight attendants and reeked of cologne. Seven more grueling hours of flight time brought us to Delhi...but then we couldn't land for an extra half-hour because of turbulent weather.

We landed finally, our bags all made it, we made it to our hotel.

The never-ending journey to India was redeemed by a few things. Namely, when we re-booked our tickets we switched from Amercian Airlines to Jet Airways, an Indian airline. This, of course, is a MAJOR upgrade. Jet Airways is a wonderful wonderful company that provides you about one delicious meal of Indian food per hour, lots of free booze, hot towels, and all sorts of other gestures of hospitality. Having just finished my tenth-or-so delicious meal about an hour before landing in Delhi, I saw the flight attendant coming down the aisle again handing something else out. I reached up as she walked past and she handed me a dark chocolate ice cream bar! I almost cried tears of joy.

As soon as I stepped out of the airport I was flooded with all of the smells, sounds, sights, and memories of India and I am unspeakably happy to be back here.
We will be in Delhi for a few more hours now before hopping on the bus to Jaipur. Our program put us up in one of India's most glamorous hotels for the night so it will be bitter-sweet to leave this place, but I'm excited to finally get to our destination.

Bye America, Namaste India!

They've gathered us together in Washington DC to build us up with statistics about how prestigious this scholarship is and then break us down with stories about how unprepared we probably all are for life in India. Whatever the case may be, tomorrow we leave!

I'm looking forward bright colors, real chai, urban cows, and blissful sensory overload. Namaste everyone and I'll write to you again from India!

Cultureclashtastic Resumes

Pete McCarthy, author of McCarthy's Bar, insists that it is important to always travel with an out-of-date guidebook in hand. It's just funnier that way. So when, after a few strokes of good luck, I found out I was going to be spending some time in India again, I quickly went to a used bookstore and found The Handbook of India, copyright 1958. Chapter three of this book reads, "Rajasthan, of all parts of India, is perhaps the most thrilling! ... Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, is a magnificent town." So far, so good.

I leave for India this Friday and should be to Jaipur by next week. Jaipur is where I will be living until late August, taking classes trying to learn Hindi. The one thing I can say with certainty about India after spending half of last year there is that hilarious mishaps and cultureclashtastic adventures are to be expected. I have accepted that I'm destined to be surrounded by awkward situations for a huge portion of my near future. I am however, reassured by a statement from The Handbook of India, "Houses with latticed windows line the street. Their rose-pink colour lends enchantment to the scene and makes it almost magical at sunset," this is how Jaipur got its nickname: The Pink City. It seems the girl with pink hubcaps and the people of Jaipur may have at least one thing in common. I think we'll get along great.