Cleanliness is next to godliness

Still no internet at the dorm..."Any minute now" has turned to "any day now" and that has turned to "maybe we'll get internet some day..."

I’ve been wanting to take some time to discuss the Indian Rupee, truly the finest currency in the world. I’ve mentioned money and prices a few times before, but not in great detail. Every time I buy something in India I have a small celebration in my head. It’s the same smug rush of excitement that comes along with discovering a typo in a well-respected publication or with finishing a crossword puzzle. After living like a pauper in Ireland last summer, living like a queen in India feels like I’ve really accomplished something. The exchange rate is about 50 Rupees to a dollar, or if you prefer, 2 cents to 1 Rupee. And even when things cost a small fraction of the price you would pay in the USA or Europe, you can still haggle to pay less. 400 Rupees for that hand-embroidered artisan shirt?! Preposterous! I’ll have it for no more than 250! I realized after one such shopping experience that coming to India may very well be the first financially responsible decision I have ever made.

I have, in fact, started classes and I would tell you what they are, but my schedule is still not finalized and I also don’t feel like it. In any case, yesterday was a Muslim holiday and no classes are being held. At first, my peers and I saw this as an opportunity to explore the city and have a day of fun, but soon we found out that it’s best not to try to go anywhere since the streets would be filled with penitent Muslim men inflicting pain upon themselves.

I took the opportunity, instead to sleep in and do mundane things like laundry. I should have guessed that even the mundane becomes an adventure in India. The laundry machines themselves were a puzzle and a mystery, but proved no match for my wit and dexterity. I got them started with no problem but was outsmarted soon enough. Expecting the cycle to take half an hour or so, I waited and waited with no results. As minutes turned into hours my patience wore thin. Finally there looked to be just a few minutes left in the cycle when suddenly, the power went out. I dashed to the machines and thought perhaps I could just pull the wet clothes out since they were almost done being washed, but I opened the door and a wave of soapy water poured out. A bad idea, evidently.

Time went on and boredom worsened so I thought I might pass the time by bathing (a practice that I have been shamefully neglecting for days on end). The first obstacle to this task was the dozen or so construction workers standing around in the bathroom yelling in Telugu. The second obstacle was the fact that my towel was a wet captive of the dormant washing machine.

I returned to reading and wasting time in my room with Brenda when in wandered two Indian children. Brenda and I sat on our beds and the pre-teen boy and girl stood smiling at us in our doorway. The girl knew a few words of English such as “Hi” and “What is your name” and “pretty!” but she quickly exhausted all of these phrases and was left with nothing to say. Brenda and I laughed nervously and the four of us shared a silent, awkward few minutes before the girl said “Bye!” and the two disappeared.

Yesterday night I went with some other girls to a very fancy Chinese restaurant because everyone except for me seems to be really tired of Indian food. I'm a little surprised that I haven't gotten more tired of it, but instead I get really excited for every meal..."Indian food again?! Perfect!!" Maybe I'll eventually figure out what the foods are called or how to make it...

An Awkward Position

The University of Hyderabad offers a semester-long Yoga certification course; this was one of the things that initially attracted me to this study abroad program. One detail that the study abroad brochure fails to mention is that the course is offered at 6 AM six days a week. 6 AM is very early…even in India. Undeterred, I set out this morning with a few other brave students for our first Indian yoga class. The yoga center is as far away from the international dorm as it could possibly be so we were in for a treacherous journey before the class even began. Having no sense of direction of my own I was entirely in the hands of my peers who, as it turns out, have no sense of direction either. We biked the entirety of the campus taking every wrong turn and nearly gave up hope with the realization that familiar roads look quite different in the dark. But what's better than being tired, sweaty, and lost before the sun even comes up, eh? By 6:20 we had finally located the elusive building, but our American sense of politeness led us to the decision not to interrupt the class in session; we thought it would be best just to wait around for the 7 AM class. Evidently, the instructors felt otherwise. Out of the door burst a corpulent, elderly, Indian man who looked at us with disdain and yelled "Get in!" Fearing the circumstances of disobeying we wandered in a daze into the barn-like structure where several Indian students lay on the ground in painful positions. We assumed the positions ourselves as the instructors yelled out less than soothing instructions such as "RELAX!!" or "GET COMFORTABLE!!!" As we took on more difficult poses all of my previous yoga training was put to the test , not because I couldn’t reach the desired positions, but because I had never before attempted to swat swarms of mosquitoes away while trying to maintain a one-legged balance. India will be a fantastic place to learn yoga not only because the practice was invented here, but because it will really, truly be a challenge to my stamina, commitment, and sense of inner peace. At the end of the class the sun had come up outside and we hopped back on the bikes for the (uphill) ride back to the dorm. Invigorated by our morning jaunt we arrived to breakfast with hearty appetites and bleary eyes. And tomorrow we'll try it all again...

The Great Mysteries of Registration

It’s time to talk about school. Being in a foreign country with more purpose than just flitting about is a relatively new concept for me. Sure I was “researching” in Ireland…but let’s be serious. It’s very strange to think of this experience as a “semester” of “college.”

The campus, for example, feels much more like a tropical safari than a college campus. I have yet to see a foos ball table or a skate board. I have, however, seen a pack of monkeys and hundreds of acres of undeveloped nature. The university is actually several miles outside the city and it really does look like a huge nature park here--that is the only way I can think to describe it. All of the buildings are really far apart from each other and between each building is expansive wilderness with huge trees that obscure any glimpse of civilization. Add to that the wild animals, the unpaved roads, and the harsh sunlight, and you’ve got yourself quite an adventure for getting around. The international dorm is about a 30-45 minute walk from the rest of campus, so out here it feels even more isolated. They gave us bicycles today, so we’ll be able to get around at least a little more efficiently.

Another unusual aspect of campus is all of the buildings under construction. The construction itself doesn’t seem that unusual, but in India construction workers live at the construction sites with their entire families in temporary shanty towns. One of these shanty towns is directly behind our dorm, so as we sit listening to our Ipods in air-conditioned rooms we look out of our windows at barefoot children running in and out of tents and women carrying huge baskets of food and water to and from the work sites on their heads. All of us in the program were a little unsettled by the shanty towns at first, but after several long discussions amongst ourselves, someone brought up the point that we are really imposing our American perspectives onto this community. Who is to say that our affluent lifestyles are the one and only way to live? Our lifestyle might be just as foreign to them as theirs is to us. I think as a group we are still very uncomfortable with the glaring cultural juxtaposition that looks us in the face every day, but it is certainly humbling and thought-provoking. I think we’re going to learn a lot just by looking out the windows.

Look at me…one week in India and I’m already throwing around phrases like “cultural juxtaposition.” I guess I should try to keep the philosophizing to a minimum.

Today was theoretically the first day of classes. It was indeed a culture-clashtastic day. We American students get stressed out about registering for classes, making tightly fitting schedules by reading detailed course descriptions and emailing professors. When it is time for classes to start we expect to have the name of a building and a room number and a professor’s name. Then when we arrive at the class we expect the professor to be there syllabus in-hand ready to read off a roll-call. They do all of that a little differently in India. We got a brief book of brief course descriptions but not all of the classes that were described were actually being offered. Some, but not all of the classes had professors listed. Most of the classes are offered at the same time every day, but some are offered at a different time every day. None of the classes had rooms or even buildings listed. When we asked how we would find our classes the answer was “go to the department office and ask what room the class is in,” which wouldn’t be so hard if we knew where the departments were, or if our campus map was legible, or if there were actually people working in the department offices. I spent the larger part of the morning wandering the (massive, hot) campus and did not successfully find a single class. I was frustrated by this at first, but then I heard that most classes didn’t even meet today. Most of the students who don’t live in Andhra Pradesh (this state) are staying home until the 19^th or so because there is some festival happening. It doesn’t really seem like it’s such a big deal to miss the first few weeks of classes…especially considering most of the professors won’t be here for it. All of the American students are panicking from the disorganization of it all, but the Indian students seem pretty at ease with the situation, so I guess this is just another time we need to adapt to the ways of the culture.

New Year's in a new place

Well, we moved into the new building a few days ago. It was an upgrade in terms of comfort, but since the building was just finished, the internet hasn’t been working yet. It's still not working, but I got desperate and hiked to the library with my friends. As luck would have it, the roommate that they assigned me was my friend Brenda from Occidental, so we’ve been having fun in our new little room. The building is a pretty accommodating dorm, I’d go so far as to say it’s nicer than the Oxy dorm I had freshman year. So far the only issue that we have all had to get used to is the showers. The showers themselves are pretty nice, but cold…The explanation that we were given is that the water is “solar heated.” This does not mean that there is a solar-panel heating system rather, that the water is stored in big black cisterns above the building so the water is only hot if the sun is shining. That means you don’t want to take a shower in the morning…or the evening…

I want to tell you all about the campus but I’ll do it later.

On New Year’s eve the major event of the day was a shopping trip to a swanky store called “FabIndia.” The store is in a neighborhood of Hyderabad called “Banjara Hills” and many of us are wondering if it has any connection to Beverly Hills…the two look about the same. The area is completely secluded from the crowds, the noise, and the poverty seen in the rest of the city, and while in the majority of the city the streets are crowded by “auto rickshaws,” motorcycles and rusty pick-up trucks the streets of Banjara hills are populated by BMW’s. FabIndia is what Pottery Barn would be like if they sold traditional Indian clothing. The study abroad program paid for us to buy two traditional outfits. The women’s outfit is called a “salwar kameez” and consists of three pieces: funny pants which I can’t remember the names of, a long tunic-like shirt called a “kurta” and a giant scarf called a “dupatta.” Everything is made of super thin cotton so they work well in extremely hot weather. It was an elaborate process to get all 28 students outfitted especially since according to the sales women none of us have any concept of what matches.

All dressed up and looking like a very silly group of white kids, we left FabIndia for New Year’s dinner at a nice restaurant. Ever the graceful one, I stumbled past a chair immediately upon entering the restaurant and ripped a very sizable hole in my new kurta. Pity.

Dinner was the first time any of us had eaten “real” Indian food. The cafeteria at school serves really delicious food but they know we are Americans so they make everything about half as spicy as it is supposed to be. This dinner was spicy. At the end of the meal we were given little banana leaves rolled into pods to cleanse our spice-burned palettes. The little pods contained coconut, and some other kind of nut that is apparently a mild stimulant. Traditionally they would also be filled with chewing tobacco, but they were questionable enough even without that ingredient. People gagged on them, but I actually kind of liked mine.

New Year’s day provided endless excitement as well. We departed campus on a cushy, cheesy tour bus for a tour of the city. Our first stop was Chowmohalla Palace, the home to many generations of local rulers or “Nizams”. The palace was built in the 17^th century and has all of the appeal of a European palace with the added bonus of being in India. From the palace we took a little walk around that area of the city. India has three times the population of the USA in one third of the area, meaning that any given space in the country is nine times as crowded as Americans are used to, and after our little stroll through Old-town Hyderabad I believe it.

After an elaborate lunch we ventured to the Qutub Shahi Tombs. The tombs were also built in the 17^th century for a king and his family. Each one is a beautiful mosque, and morbid as the whole tomb thing is, the area is really lovely. To go into a mosque one must remove one’s shoes and unfortunately, one girl in our group removed her shoes never to see them again. Another lesson learned.

From the tombs we moved on to Golconda Fort which a really cool and interesting setting, but we didn’t get to walk around at all. It’s a huge hillside fort from the 15^th (?) century, but instead of roaming and exploring the buildings we attended the “Sound and Lights Show.” At the Golconda Fort Sound and Lights show you find yourself sitting in a plastic lawn chair in front of a large hill with a prerecorded sound system describing the history of the area to you as areas of rocks become illuminated by spot lights. But it’s all even less interesting than it sounds. Not one among us was unhappy about leaving the fort.

The following day was our first opportunity to explore the city on our own and we were happy to take advantage. In the evening Brenda and I, along with two New Yorkers, two Bostonians and a New Jersey-er adventured to dinner to celebrate one girl’s birthday. Brenda’s guidebook had recommended a restaurant in Banjara Hills (the swanky neighborhood from the shopping trip) and we decided to hire some auto-rickshaws to get there. An auto-rickshaw could be compared to a tiny, three-wheeled golf cart or a double-wide Vespa with a roof, so in India that means it is a 4 passenger vehicle. Auto-rickshaws are very inexpensive and surprisingly fast so they are good if you want to get somewhere or if you want to die. Four of us squeezed into the back of one and three into the other, but even with some people sitting on others’ laps I still ended up with one butt-cheek hanging out the side of the rickshaw. Our vehicle was driven by two boys who looked no more than 17 and who apparently had a death-wish. As we dodged in and out of traffic at 50 mph sometimes into oncoming traffic and sometimes with only an inch separating us from the other vehicles I counted several dozen ways in which I could have perished. I guess I shouldn’t have been as terrified as I was considering most Indian women seem to have no inhibitions about riding side-saddle on the back of a motorcycle holding onto nothing but five shopping bags and a baby…no helmet necessary. Eventually (after the driver-boys had yelled to a moving motorcyclist to ask for directions) we made it (alive) to our destination. The ride was a good 45 minutes all the way across town and we paid the equivalent of 4 American dollars, though we did try to haggle for less.

We had a truly rags-to-riches experience as we stepped from our three-wheeled death-trap into Fusion 9 which turned out to be one of the nicest restaurants I’ve ever stepped into. We were a little hesitant that it might be out of our price range, but my mouth-watering meal cost about 6 American dollars. The only meals I can get for that price in the USA generally come on paper plates, and this arrived on a sculptural platter of decadence.

And then for some reason we rode back in a rickshaw.

Today we went to a Bollywood movie and tomorrow classes start, but I'm sure you're tired of reading. Hopefully our dorm will get the internet soon, but I've learned that "any minute now" does not mean the same thing in India.

In answer to Nicole's question, yes I have seen many monkeys...they run wild on campus but I haven't been able to get a picture yet...little tricksters...I've also seen a large assortment of cows, camels, giant bats, strange birds, etc, etc.