Homestay No More

Tonight, I gave my host family my end-of-stay gift, which they did not like. It’s not that they disliked the gift, they disliked the giving. In a period of about two minutes, my mumma went through the following outrages:
-What?

-What have you done?!

-You have spoiled your money!

- You must take it with you – you are our daughter, it is not right for a daughter to give us things.

- You are our guest here!

- You already gave us things when you arrived!

- You are so naughty! (but this time she used the extreme version “badmaash” instead of “notcot” which she normally calls me, but is nicer)

Anyways, because I bought them a wooden camel statue with an Indian version of Romeo and Juliet on the back, which is way too big to ever fit in my already packed suitcase, I pushed my way through the protests and found a home for the camel in the living room. Rather, I found a place in the corner to put it, and my mumma and didi suggested that I put it in the middle of the room so, yeah, they like it.

But didi did warn me that if my parents bring presents when they come to visit, then she is going to slap me twice. Forewarned is forearmed, Didi!

Speaking of packing, this morning I woke up for a nice Sunday morning breakfast with the family, and then Mumma packed all of my things for me. I tried to help, but she mostly just had me point to where things were going (America, back to school, or with me for the next month) and then folded things more neatly than I possibly capable of. So maybe it was better to let her take this one.

My last day in my homestay has been really bittersweet – I am excited to see a new part of India, but I am going to really miss my family here. This morning, my softspoken buppa and I had a forty-five minute long talk where he told me about tigers. Where they live, how they hunt, how many places his son-in-law has gone to see them, what they are called in Hindi, and so. He acted out what a tiger hunting a bison looks like, which was pretty interesting.

Feels like Home: Tina Fey was in the Jaipur paper today

The little things about my family, as usual, are exactly what I will miss about them. For example, last night, I think I heard my mumma curse for the first time when she saw that she had forgotten about a bowl of curd in the freezer (“Oh. shit!”). My didi also does a really good impression of what Indian traffic sounds like (“They all honk so much! Beep bonp bloop berp!”). I think the difference is that she incorporates Hindi’s nasalization of certain noises, which really brings her mimic to the next level.

I will have to reunite with them when I get back, because Mumma won’t let me leave my suitcase at school – she will keep it here for me. “And then, when you get back, you will ring us up first. And then you can come and take rest, and then we will drop you with the other students at the guest house.” Didi told her that there is a certain time that we have to check in, and Mumma said “Oh! Just like jail!” Buppa also has told me every night for the past week that he will be very lonely after I go, and that I keep them very busy and entertained. So, yes, I will miss them a lot.

But, I am also glad to be on the move! My program is divided into 4 academic classes, 3 of which take place simultaneously. Those just finished on Saturday, so my hours of enduring Hindi classes taught by 4 teachers at once is over, as is the corralling of 20 American students into one house 5-6 days a week. I’ve learned a lot while here so far – which is why I could tell how surprised Didi was when I gave the camel, but also that she wasn’t telling Mumma why when she called her to the room to see – but now I start a totally different type of learning. The remaining class is our Independent Study Project, a hallmark of my program’s method in all of its sites. They prep you for two months, then send you out on your own.

Tomorrow morning, I leave at 6 am on a train to go study disaster relief and risk reduction in Sikkim, a small state in the north east of India. I am going to be cool once again – Indians flock to the mountains in the summer so that they can get out of the heat. I will be on my own! Daunting but exciting.

Treat. Yo. Self.

Okay - pop quiz. The semester is racing by. Pretty soon you will get kicked out of the house, and told to fend for yourself for a month. For now, you live one train ride away from the City of Lakes. What do you do?

The answer is a simple three words - Treat. Yo. Self.

Inspired by modern day heros on the staff of the Pawnee Parks and Recreation department, I decided to go for it, and treat. my. self.
      So a trip to Udaipur it was!

Long story short: The weekend went fabulously. I feel as though I have done very well by myself.

Long story medium-length: There were almost no bad moments in the whole weekend - from watching the sunrise over the train after arriving in Udaipur while drinking a freshly made chai, discovering chocolate balls and other quasi-european baked goods at lake view bakeries, driving a rickshaw along the lake while singing along to Bollywood songs played off the rickshaw walla's phone, walking around a spice market, seeing too many "Octopussy" signs to count, accidentally eating lunch next to the GM of the Lake Palace Hotel, relaxing on a pre-sunset lake boat tour, and so on.
     It just felt telling when we finally arrived to our last lakeside T.Y.S. restaurant on Sunday night, and as we walked in fireworks went off over the lake. And then as we sat down at a table, we watched a rehearsed dance go off across the water in the lit up City Palace.
    One week left before I am heading off on my own way, and I feel so contented.


Long story, in photos:

Our first view as we arrived.

"This shirt? This shirt was a gift from a rich man!"

They're already ready for my big sis!

Sold me some juice!

Apparently this learnin' school teaches elephants to paint.

Udaipur's City Palace

This sign was on the verge of causing an existential crisis.

The iconic image of Treat. Yo. Self.  --  Just hanging out, laughing and relaxing.

Final Field Trip

    We closed out class time last week with a field trip out to Laporiya, a village three hours away from Jaipur that has had success with reintroducing indigenous water saving methods. While their work was really interesting, it is also getting hot, and I stupidly drank most of my water on the bus. So instead of learning lots and lots of indigenous culture, I learned some. And I took lots of pictures.

Glasses. Turban. Necklace. What a Ji.

So... Rajasthan is a desert.

This guy rolled past our introductory lecture just after the ugliest goat I have ever seen left. No joke - it looked like part mule, part goat, and it baaahed really oddly. It was terrifying because it also had a small case of the crazy eyes. But this guy was pretty normal.

This frog was absolutely huge. It lived in the small cement 'pond' the village keeps for wildlife - the whole village has adopted a no-killing-of-anything policy, so they help these guys live.

Things are getting a little 'Survivor' out there - Peter found a beetle. And he just started to go for it.

Flowers!

6 Foot, 7 Foot, 8 Foot...

Yes, this man is holding a very close model of a human foot.

     We our entering the last third of our time here - which means that the formal classes (aka in a classroom) are winding down. In somewhat of a frustrating turn, that means that our Sustainable Development and Social Change seminar has turned from the theme of "What are the problems with everything in the world, and why can't people fix them well?" into asking the question, "What works?" So we are finally taking some field trips that have a positive spin instead of learning about female infantoecide, lack of education, inequality, etc.
    What that means is that on Thursday of last week, we went to Jaipur Foot.

Foot mold. Obviously.

    The organization was certainly a change of pace from when we roll into villages in our "Tourist" bus, and ask people to tell us what is wrong with everything in their lives. Instead, we were welcomed by D.R. Mehta, the director of the organization, who was full of inspirational sayings  and impressive magazine clippings about how awesome his organization is. Like this one, for example.
   It was so lovely to have someone talk to us who so clearly knows what they are doing, and is full of things like "Do you know what E = mc^2 really means? Effect is equal to money times compassion squared!"

Feet in the making! This whole day felt like the alternate, nice version of Frankenstein's laboratory.

    Basically, Jaipur Foot gives prosthetic limbs fitted to each individual who comes to them for free. Everyone. And they also make wheel chairs. And they also designed their own artificial knee.
  We walked around to the waiting room, and saw amputees and accident victims waiting to be met with, and other people in the middle of the half hour casting process to get their new limbs.

Men working on piles of limbs outside of the factory.

     And then to show off how good their limbs are, this man jumped out of a tree with his Jaipur Foot.

Lungi in Action

Just wanted to throw up some photographic evidence of the Southern India lungi trend. Now that my coconut walla's sartorial choices are properly documented, I feel much better.

Photo Potpourri

Henna-ed hands!

Jyoti-ji, one of our Hindi teachers, color-coordinated with the school.

One particularly intense, film-ready guard at the Taj Mahal.

Chillin.

Holy Cow! Chillin in Jaipur.

Carpe diem! And seize the shot too!

I haven't taken too many photos recently, but I have a large back catalog of things that the world needs to see. So here are some, in order from recent to very old.

I tried Googling 'study abroad cliches' so that I could write my most cliched post, but the results were not what I was hoping for. Let's just say I am 'growing a lot,' 'learning a lot about the world' and 'broadening my horizons' within our 'diverse' 'global village.' 'This is a life changing experience." "it's just going by so fast!"

Back in Rajasthan

     I am safe and sound back in my normal homestay. I know my last post was about how weird the day was at the university, and the rest of the week was just as strange. I had more lectures to no one, used microphones in empty rooms, got shown laboratories where we just stared blankly at expensive research equipment with no explanation, and spent a lot of time sweating.

    We had some good times, but they were mostly couched in long moments of stress, repeating what you wanted, and lots of sighs. Our fieldtrips about trash got repetitive, we ordered in at the hostel too many nights from too small a menu, and our food came too often in plastic bags. I have seen vermi compost centers three times since I've been in India, which is 3 more than Ive seen in America and 2 more than I needed to pursue here.

    A perfect sample of my Chennai experience can be summed up by the events of Wednesday afternoon. Completing our lectures early to a room of only ourselves, my study abroad peers and staff chaperone for the trip, the homestay advisor, ate lunch at the university, then sat and waited for about 20 minutes in the deans office to come to the school. From there, we loaded into the cab, and our homestay advisor, Rama, told us that we would be going to the mall. She had talked to someone, they recommended it, and so we would go. It would probably take an hour.
    Once we got in the car, three of squashed into the non-AC backseat, we heard Rama blunder through conversation with the cab driver. Being that Chennai is in Tamil Nadu, everyone speaks Tamil and maybe some English, so we heard them negotiate talking about how long it would take - actually closer to an hour and half. So we slept and sweated in the back, until we pulled up to a huge mall in the middle of a low but dense urban area, and piled out of the car, rushing through the humidity into the mall. The mall was a bizarre piece of Americana excess in the middle of India - Burberry, Hush Puppies and an Aldo were among the stores, as well as a movie theater showing English, Hindi and Tamil language films. There was also a food court with a special KFC and Pizza Hut (pizza, in India, is pronounced with a softer z, like the end of quiz). The five of us walked around the mall exactly like a group of four 20-somethings with very different fashion tastes and needs and a middle-aged Indian surrogate mom would: haphazardly. Furthermore, no matter what store we paused in front of, our Indian mom told us that everything it sold would be available in Jaipur as well. As she had said that about everything in Chennai - from coconuts and beach games to humidity and lungis - we had to take it with a grain of salt.
     Then the 4 students decided to assert ourselves by picking a restaurant out of Lonely Planet and convincing Rama to get our cab to go there, which also involved taking a walk past the food court just to make sure that we didn't want anything there. We didn't.
      Our pick from LP was an American diner, run by American ex-pats with pictures of Frank Sinatra on the walls. We piled back in the cab, sat for 15 minutes waiting to get out of the mall parking lot. On this particular leg, I was seated in the front of the car, where one student inevitably sat between Rama and the driver - the exact spot where one's right leg was inevitably in the way of the car's gear stick. So we waited, then drove, then asked for directions 4 times, then came very close to finding the American diner, and then a rickshaw man told us that diner was in the middle of a 2 month closure for renovation. Too sick of hostel food to call it a night and drive the now half-hour long drive home, we picked another restaurant from LP and started off again.
     Our taxi driver didn't know this place - Tuscana - or the neighborhood - something that sounds like Nungabukum - or the region within the 'hood -Wallace Gardens. No matter - we went off. About 20 minutes later, and 4 songs of ABBA sung in duet with Rama in the front seat, and we were close - misleading close - to the restaurant. And then we made a wrong turn, down a one way street, so we had to circle back. Then we made the same wrong turn again. So we circled back.And then we circled again. For the third time.
   Finally asserting my reading ability from the front seat, I pointed out that rather than making the same turn a fourth time, we should probably turn left as both 1st and 2nd street were on the left, and presumably Tuscana, located on 3rd street, would also be on the left, rather than to the right, which by the way, we had checked three times already. We turned left, then turned down the street after 2nd, which turned out to be 2nd again. BUT it connected to Third, so lo and behold - we had arrived.
   Two pasta dishes, one pizza, and a calzone, prepared by an Italian expat, and we were 4 happier campers. Then we piled back in the taxi, sweated our way home, and watched some Bollywood music videos and called it a night.

Key words here: hot, humid, lost, language barrier, culture gap, and ultimately, goals somewhat met.


 Alright alright, enough with the whining - here are some photos:

This sign inexplicably showed up on Wednesday of our week at the university - and I think disappeared for the remaining days. We are the "Undergraduate Students of the United States of America" that it is calling out. Note that no other people are in this picture.

We all bought saris! And then enjoyed our best approximation of a nice stiff drink to take the edge of the very sweaty day.

We are literally staring at a big tank of trash.

I rode a horse at the beach! The young gentlemen helping me on the horse told me his name was Bruce Lee - "Yes, like fight.. like dragon.. enter the fist!"

Guilty. I had to go shooting again. It was so fun! I did so good this time too. I got 4 out of 5.