Ek Din

I realized that though this blog is named after Jaipur and I spend that majority of my time here, I really haven't talked about Jaipur very much in this blog. This is in part because when in Jaipur I'm usually going to school, eating, or napping. I have actually yet to visit any of Jaipur's most famous attractions (I will soon! I promise!) But since I've had some questions about what it is that I actually do here, allow me to walk you though a day in the Jaipur life.

I wake up every morning here in my little room at the Gem Inn, the strange hotel that I have been calling home. Usually, upon waking up I am already covered in my first layer of sweat for the day in spite of the air conditioner. In my sleepy state I stumble to my bathroom where I must stand on tip-toes to flip the switch to turn on my water heater which is mounted above my shower. Heating water takes electricity, a scarce resource in a huge Indian desert city, so the water gets heated only when necessary. It takes 15 minutes or so to heat up, giving me some time to flop back onto my rock-hard bed for a bit. Showers in India typically consist of just a bucket and a faucet. At the Gem, I am fortunate enough to have an actual shower-head, but like many Indian bathrooms, the shower is just mounted on the wall and the water leads to a drain in the corner of the bathroom floor, so essentially the whole room is the shower...there's no curtain or door dividing one sections from another.

After showering, I turn the water heater off then go to breakfast. At the Gem, breakfast is served in a strange room in the basement and usually consists of delicious chai, toast, bananas, and maybe cereal (with hot milk, strangely) or porridge.

Those of us students that live in the Gem are carried to school in a vehicle that looks like a minivan, but is about half the size and fits twice the people--at least 7 or 8 passengers can fit in one of these. On the drive to school a few cars and hundreds of motorcycles pass us by, each one's passengers doing double-takes at the van full of Westerners. Stopped at red lights, we usually get little beggar children reaching their arms into our open windows asking for Rupees.

We arrive at school and are greeted "Namaste," by the friendly guard who sits in the building's driveway all day. Our school is located in a little building that looks like a residential apartment and bears a sign reading "Dentist," for a reason that remains unclear to me. By the time we arrive a fresh pot of lemon tea is usually awaiting us.

Classes begin at 9:00 am, but actually usually 9:10. Each classroom is tiny and crowded with several tiny desks. If there's electricity to spare, the A/C will be turned on, otherwise the ceiling fans will be going making it hard to hear, hard to keep papers sitting on your desk, and hard to keep your eyeballs moist. Our schedule is different every day, but today the intermediate students (there are 6 of us) began with conversation class. Our topic for discussion today was "compare life in India and life in America." Our teachers are remarkably patient as we stumble through our sentences in "Hinglish."

After conversation class we headed to our community project class. In this class every week we present a little story about someone we met in the community or some Hindi language experience we had that week. Today I talked about the cat that lived in my hotel on my trip to Rishikesh.

After two classes there is, of course, a break for chai.

After chai, we often go to grammar class. In that class we learn grammar.

Today, our last class of the day was our weekly "monolingual guest presentation." This is where the school invites a member of the community to come speak to us about their job or their life so that we can get exposed to some slang, some vernacular, and some variations in accents. Today they invited a sapera, a snake charmer! Charming indeed!

Today was a pretty typical class load, but on some days we watch movies, or read stories, or have private tutorials... you get the idea. After four classes our day is over and it's time for lunch, which is invariably delicious. Lunch at AIIS, as with most standard Indian meals, usually consists of one chaval (rice) dish, one daal (lentils), two different subze (vegetable curries), yogurt, chapati (flat bread, like a tortilla), and sometimes fruit (like mangoes or papaya) for dessert. Everything is served on a big tin plate and eaten with a spoon.

After school there's usually some time to go out for a bit, or to study (if you're that kind of person). This is the period of time in which I sometimes visit the yoga center near school, but yesterday some girls were going jewelry shopping. I thought that sounded like a great way to procrastinate while also wasting money, so I joined them on a trip to M.I. Road, an old-city shopping area. Jaipur is pretty famous for gem trading, so this was actually a very important part of my cultural immersion...right? I bought these fun gold and ruby earrings. And yes, the casual after-school trip to the gem dealer speaks volumes about the favorable exchange rate in India. And no, I certainly do not go shopping every day.

If one has gone out after school one must find one's way back to the Gem. This involves hailing an auto-rickshaw. As rickshaws are everywhere and they love to pick up foolish foreigners (we once had a rickshaw wallah for our monolingual guest and he admitted it), this is not a problem. However, it usually takes several tries haggling with several different drivers to find someone who will take you back for a good price which should be about 50 Rupees ($1).

We pay the rickshaw wallah and unload outside the Gem. We then walk down the dirt road past the neighborhood goats who live in the shanty-town adjacent to the building. Inside the door we pass the brightly-colored shrine and the big fish tank and are greeted "Namaste!" once again, but the employees at the desk. The Gem probably has about 25 rooms and about 15 employees, most of whom are teenage boys. Most of the employees live in the building and sleep in the lobby at night.

To get to my room I climb three flights of stairs in the hot, humid hallway. I get to my room, number 308, and open the door to a cold burst of air. The A/C cools the room to an icy 28 degrees Celsius (82 degrees Fahrenheit) which is always a drastic change from the temperature in the hallway.

At the Gem we eat dinner around 7:30 pm. On Thursdays, like today, we get Chow Mein. Most other days we get something similar to what we get a school for lunch. And after dinner I can usually motivate myself to begin studying for the next day's round. Tomorrow: an exam.