Internship

It seems that I am well over due for an update. I’ve been lacking the inspiration for a new posting because life here has become rather status quo. My internship at Cecodecon is 9-5 five days a week. This forty-hour week work is generous in comparison to some of my classmate’s internships who require that they come in on Saturdays and the occasional Sunday. My NGO, as with most NGOs in India, does not have a specific focus and instead works on “all things”. I pass my days researching about the Kyoto Protocol and the legal framework of international climate change policies. Interesting stuff, but definitely hard to stay focused for eight hours a day. I luckily did not end up moving to the accommodations at the work-site. Cecodecon is located in a very small town with absolutely nothing to do. One of the host fathers has graciously agreed to give my classmate Tiffany and me rides to and from so that we are able to stay in our original home stays.

A highlight of my internship will be a climate change tribunal held in Delhi on November 16th. There will be testimonials from villagers whose lives have been substantially degraded by climate change. A jury will judge these testimonials and “verdicts” will be given. The main goal of this tribunal is to increase awareness and hopefully get some more attention to the reality of the immediate impacts that climate change is having on people in the rural areas. I’m very interested to see how this tribunal actually plays out and what the actual outcomes are.

The most aggravating thing to me about working in this organization, and more specifically working with Indian climate change policies is the lack of accountability that they take. Article after article emphasizes that the developed world has exorbitant GHG emissions and that they need to take more proactive approaches to mitigating these as these emissions are directly degrading their citizens’ quality of life. They following then note that India indeed is in the top of the world in regards to GHG emissions, but that they cannot possibly be asked to set lower emission standards for their own country as it would dissuade from the development process. While lowering emissions would slow the development process initially, if they were to successfully do this they would in turn be developing in a sustainable manner. Furthermore, if they were to set their own standards for lower emissions it would show the rest of the world that they really are feeling the degrading affects of climate change and will do whatever is in their power to mitigate their losses and it will exemplify their willingness to take a leadership position in this issue that so readily affects their country. Needless to say, every time I read a new document I get a little be riled up.

Since the majority of the students remaining in Jaipur have to work on Saturdays it doesn’t really look like much more traveling is in the cards for us until the end of the program. This, however, is a nice change of pace from the constant stressful going, going, going. We’ve now given ourselves some time to collect our thoughts, do some reading, do some sleeping, and I even joined a gym. It’s a much more livable lifestyle. However, I am bursting with excitement for my travels after the program. I have officially booked my flight down to Goa, where I will be staying for four days, and then I will spend the next four days in Mumbai, and then fly on back to Chicago. And how time flies. I will be embarking on this journey on December 11th, a little over a month away.

This week is Diwali, a holiday that I do not fully have a clue what it is about. There is a religious aspect in the Hindu religion, but since I don’t really know much about that I haven’t exactly followed. One thing that I have gotten loud and clear is that it is a festival of lights. The whole city is being transformed, similar to our Christmas decorations. Everyone is excited and there is are fireworks going off quite regularly. I’m mostly excited about it because I get the rest of the week off of work. It sounds like I should expect more fireworks, more lights, and lots of eating. I guess, like pretty much everything else here, I will discover that when the time comes.

Bundi and The Common Wealth Games

I have officially survived two trips away from Jaipur without the protection of a male companion. Surprisingly these trips weren’t as scary as we had anticipated. However, in true Indian fashion we did run in to some roadblocks. Our first destination was Bundi, a small tourist town in Rajasthan where Kipling once wrote and allegedly served to be the inspiration for his novel Kim. I have not personally read this piece, or anything by Kipling in fact, but if you have perhaps you can see where Kipling was coming from after checking out my pictures. My roommate Jocelyn and I hopped on to a bus en route to this esteemed destination. They gave us seat one and two, the first two seats that are slightly isolated from the rest of the bus. On the way home they gave us the same two seats, and even kicked people out of those seats to give them to us. While this phenomenon was slightly confusing to us we assumed that maybe this was to minimize our harassment? While we were waiting for the bus to pull out of the station I was harassed nonetheless. A man was perpetually putting his hand on my shoulder and back and was not deterred by my rather public and loud chastisement of him. After that small debacle it was smooth sailing for the next long five hours. Well, perhaps not exactly smooth sailing, as it was a very bumpy and jostling ride, but what else could really be expected?

We arrived at 11 at night tired and ready to fall in to our beds. We hailed a rickshaw and were delivered to the door of the guesthouse where we had made a reservation. While we had the presence of mind to make a reservation, we did not have enough to remember to call our accommodations to inform them of how late we would be arriving; in Bundi at 11 PM the entire town is fast asleep. So we found ourselves stranded in front of our guesthouse on a dark alley attempting to open the door, not quite cognitive enough to accept the fact that our hosts were not going to wake up. Luckily, or perhaps not so luckily, there was a guesthouse right across the street. All of our attempts to get in to the other guesthouse woke up the owner of the adjacent guest house and following the lady offered us a room for the night. This being India with our guard constantly up we were slightly skeptical. Yet the time and our exhaustion did not really allow us any other options. We graciously accepted her room for 200 RS a night. 200 RS roughly translates to 4 USD. But let me tell you, it was not even worth that. It was entirely infested with bugs. We laid down in the beds and instantly had bugs crawling over every inch of our body. Jocelyn conveniently brought bug spray with some absurd concentration of DEET, which we doused our bodies and bed in. I ended up wrapping my head in a scarf to ward off bug bites on my face. Somehow we fell asleep, but it was in no way a deep or fulfilling sleep at all. I now have bug bites all over my body. Hopefully none of these bugs were carrying any diseases.

While we left that guest house as soon as possible and found ourselves is much more pleasant accommodations, the rest of our weekend followed suit with not exactly going according to plan. We spent the next morning touring a dilapidated palace and doing a little shopping. For the afternoon we had planned to go visit this picturesque waterfall that the Lonely Planet Guide raved about. In order to get there we would have to take an hour-long rickshaw ride. We met and informed a British couple who was staying at our new guesthouse of our plans and together we arranged a rickshaw to take the four of us to this waterfall. About a half an hour in to the ride our rickshaw decided that it was its time to die, and puttered out in a small little village. Our driver informed us that another rickshaw would be there in thirty minutes to rescue us. The villagers rustled up four little stools for us to sit on, and the four of us got to know each other a little better while the village crowed around us to stare at the strange people. We never did end up making it to that waterfall as the following day we had to stay at our guesthouse and write our first papers for the semester. It was quite a bummer that we had to miss out on this acclaimed waterfall, but the Bundi experience was nonetheless pretty amazing.

The following week the Common Wealth Games opened in New Delhi. For those of you who have no idea what the Common Wealth Games are they are an Olympic style competition between the former British colonies, as well as Britain itself. When we initially flew in to Delhi the whole city was kind of a pit as it was undergoing renovations with the hope of being immaculate by the time the games began. My housemate Dede and I decided that it was entirely necessary that we attend, it’s not every day you get the opportunity to go to a sporting event of that magnitude. After making all of the accommodations the only true pocket buster was our transportation to and from Delhi. The actual tickets for the games were rather cheap, 2-4 USD. So we made all of the accommodations and set off to go early on Saturday morning. We had the conception that Delhi would be filled with people, as it always is, and furthermore filled with tourists. As we entered Delhi we could immediately sense that this was not going to be the case. While the city itself was very nicely put together, the people so characteristic of pretty much anywhere in India were nowhere to be found. Yet, it was not only local people that were missing from the equation, the tourists were also missing. This proved to be a very strange sight indeed.

While we were yet again the novelty white people we attended the games with a lot of enthusiasm. We had tickets to a field hockey game of Canada v Trinidad and Tobago and following tickets to an evening squash match. The field hockey stadium was not even close to being full, in fact it was much closer to being empty. The audience was predominately Indian, there were very few representatives from Canada and Trinidad and Tobago. As Canada is our neighbor Dede and I thought it would be only right for our allegiance to lie with them. We were surprised to find that the majority of our Indian counterparts felt the same way. The whole stadium was animatedly cheering for Canada. After making friends with the fans next to us they told us that this phenomenon was probably due to the fact that Canada is just easier to say. The whole game was quite fun with the enthusiastic crowds. The following squash match we attended was not quite as exciting. I had never seen squash before and did not exactly catch on to what was actually going on. Following the games we splurged for a delicious meat filled dinner and returned to Jaipur.

Some of you have noticed that I haven’t really been veiling my negativity all that well in my recent blog posts. But I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that my negativity derived from the difficulty is beginning to subside. Many of the things that were aggravating me before I have stopped noticing or stopped caring about. Furthermore, this week we went to a restaurant called Barbeque Nation where we had all you can eat meat filled barbeque, what’s not to love? Of course, next week all of the students are moving to new locations in Rajasthan. We are starting our internships next week and will all be given accommodations near those locations. My internship is located in Rajasthan and is through the NGO Cecoedcon (http://www.cecoedecon.org/home.htm). Ideally I will be working with environmental policy, but won’t really know what I’ll be doing until I get there. As for my accommodations I will be living in a hostel near the main office. Hopefully I will have at least decent food there. That pretty much concludes the recent news in India. This weekend we are heading out to the desert to go on a camel safari! We are all very excited about this!

A Trip to the Taj

We’ve officially spent a month in India now. It feels like we have been here forever and yet it also has seemed to go by very quickly, if you can make sense of that paradox at all. Two weekends ago a group of five of us went on our first adventure without the watchful eye of MSID. We hired a driver to take us to Matura to see Krishna’s birthplace and to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. While seeing the Taj was absolutely everything it’s cracked up to be, the trip as a whole turned out to be my breaking point and first strong dislike of this country. We finally got a good solid dose of being treated like tourons, with guides and our driver perpetually lying and trying swindle money out of us. It’s a very tiring venture to attempt to keep your sanity whilst putting up with guides lying to your face and telling you that they are “honest”. After returning back to our host family my first feelings were that there is absolutely no way that I want to spend 10 days after the program traveling and continually dealing with being screwed over.

With all of the terrible that came with our first touristy trip, there was of course some good. By the time we got to the Taj is was Sunday and we had spent all of Saturday dealing with nonsense from our ‘guide’, so needless to say we were all bitter. After our driver dropped us off we were instantly bombarded with all sorts of obnoxious people trying to sell us stupid things and men trying to be our guides and other nonsense. After much ado we purchased our 750 rupee ticket to enter the premises (the Indians only have to pay 20 rupees), made some friends with some British boys to share a guide with them, and then we finally entered. From the chaos that was outside, the inside grounds were instantly peaceful. It was pouring rain and yet we just did not care. We were finally seeing this awesome piece of architecture that we had spent our whole life hearing about its wonders. As beautiful as it was, I think that was the coolest part, being in the presence of a building that has transcended religion, turmoil, and continents, to be renowned as one of the wonders of the modern world. Some intense stuff.

Another anecdote that I took home with me from this trip was an anger, or moreover confusion, of how artifacts are preserved in this country. In short, one can say that they are not. On this trip we stopped at a museum where none of the pieces were behind protective covering, nor even properly cleaned. With this method of maintenance I can only imagine that the relics will not stand the test of time. This of course was not an isolated incident, as various monuments we have seen have had graffiti and it is a common practice for guides giving tours of ancient places to take their guests to the roped off areas and suggest that they touch the silver or whatnot from centuries before. At the Amber Fort our guide pointed out one the last remaining Kama Sutra paintings left on the fort; it was small and the casual observer would not have noticed it. In previous years, however, the fort had many Kama Sutra paintings that were large and dispersed all over the fort. These were whitewashed over, as they were considered unsavory for the family audience. For a country with such a rich and elaborate history it seems so unfortunate to me that they would not take the previsions to preserve it and are willing to discredit historic relics on the basis of them being unsavory.

After the Taj trip I spent the next week with a hate for India. Just entirely sick of being treated poorly for being white, sick of how inconvenient things are, just sick of everything. As we’ve gotten farther away from that trip my stamina for this place is growing again. One of the things that the pre-session kids had advised on how to deal in India is to remember not to get mad and pissed off. You gotta roll with the punches. As I’m starting to do that again things are looking brighter, and I remember that not all Indian people are out to screw me. Last Saturday we went out for a hike to a temple and ended up meeting a nice couple, getting a free meal, a free ride, and an invitation to their home in Mumbai if we are ever in the area. That’s the India I am going to have to focus on if I want to make it through these next three months with my sanity intact.

Last Friday our field trip took us to one of the slums of the city. This particular slum consisted of lots of little square minimalistic residences. They were ten by ten squares that housed a bed and negligible life possessions. On our tour of this slum Indian dancing, puppetering, and beadwork demonstrations entertained us. These are the crafts that theoretically earn the residents of the slums a living. Speaking with one my professors on the topic of the slums she contended that the problem of the slums is the same problem that plagues all of India, which is overpopulation. She likes to take these field trips as her time to be a personal advocate of family planning. There was indeed a plethora of children living in this particular slum, whether this is to lack of education or contraception or foresight I’m not entirely sure, but I would imagine that each factor plays a role. Apparently each of these things are available, that people do attempt to educate and offer conceptives. However, children are a source of free labor, the more children a person has the more labor they have at their disposal. I have recently just started reading a book entitled Slumming India: A Chronicle of Slums and Their Saviors so hopefully this book will leave me more educated on slums and how this problem is perpetuated.

On a completely unrelated note, the monkeys have begun to invade our homestay neighborhood. When we first arrived here all of the MSID students had the same feeling about monkeys that our Asian study abroad students have about squirrels on the University of Illinois’s campus; that they are cute, interesting, and exotic. Indeed, they are, I have taken my fair share of pictures of the little critters. However, they have another quality that is not quite so endearing, they are freaking scary. We’ve all been hearing horror stories of these monkeys going in to houses and destroying things, attacking people, and causing general mischief (ie monkey business). Apparently their moving to our neighborhood has something to do with the changing of seasons, but I am at this point much more concerned with the havoc they may wreck rather than their cute and cuddly appearance. Ideally I won’t come home with any personal stories with monkey destruction.

As the month now comes to a close we are welcoming October with the knowledge that it ushers in the beautiful season of winter. Hopefully this means that there will be a cease to the 95-degree days very soon. Along with the cooling off, this month we will also all be shipped off to various areas of Rajasthan for our internship. I, being the procrastinator that I am, have not yet found and internship, so hopefully I will happen upon one of those within the next few days. And for those generous souls out there, anyone who would like to send me some non-perishable American food I would love to be the grateful recipient.

Being white in America I have never experienced being a minority. Here, I am a blatant minority. Furthermore the concept of ‘minority’ takes on a whole new meaning in India. America is the ‘melting pot’ and therefore while there is a clear caucasian majority, there are people of all different ethnicities everywhere you look (of course this depends on where you are in the country but you get the point). The same is not true of India at all. Everyone here is of Indian descent, not just the majority, everyone. So therefore being white is a novelty. When we walk down the street there is no end of staring, and this comes in all forms: men making gestures at us, saying obnoxious things to us, asking for our numbers, everyone trying to sell us things in extremely broken English, beggars grabbing us, pointing to their children’s mouth and making a head movement as if to say, “come on, she’s hungry!!”, people taking pictures of us, people alerting their family members that there are white people in the area. This excessive attention can definitely be draining, at some point it just makes you feel like a circus act. I just want to say, “we get it, I’m white, now can we move on?”. Of course with the language barrier this would accomplish nothing, except perhaps more starring. As a result I being out in public for extended periods of time when I’m not really ready to deal with this can be stressful.

With all of this unwanted attention one of the methods of dissuading it is theoretically attempting to dress like the local people. This is not a simple task as the local people wear all sorts of things. Married women tend to wear beautiful saree, even the beggar women seem to have these lovely ensembles. The women also wear salwar suits (a big shirt with baggy cloth pants and a scarf) and occasionally curtas (tunic tops with leggings and a scarf). However the women of my own ‘unmarried’ age bracket wear much more westernized clothing such as jeans and a t-shirt. If they are really dressing up, or just like to look nicer they generally wear the curta ensemble, but they sometimes just couple the tunic with a pair of jeans. So needless to say there is not a correct wardrobe. We’ve basically decided that if you feel comfortable in it, it’s fine, and that either way people are going to stare. By comfortable I don’t mean sweatpants, rather I mean if you feel like you are covered up enough to not elicit sexual attention. So that means no legs showing, no cleavage, and if you are going to wear a tank top you better bring a scarf to cover up if you go in to a really crowed area. So girls have been wearing all sorts of things, I’ve basically just been sticking to long skirts and t-shirts because that’s what I have found be to the most comfortable.

One annoyance that has been growing for me is the constant begging. At home I normally find myself sympathizing with those who are impoverished. I completely understand that argument that there are people who are in that state due to their own accord, but I also know that there are many people that are impoverished because they have fallen on hard times and hard circumstances and lack of opportunity. Therefore I tend to be in support of tax money helping to fix the problem as well as donating my own time and money towards the cause. Here, with the caste system and religious views, their whole social stratification is completely different. People are born in to their caste and social standing and believe that is the card they have been dealt, that social standing is what they are and what they will always be, and it is right and good to fully perpetuate that standing throughout their lifetime. Thus, the rich stay rich, the poor stay poor, and each person believes that is what they are supposed to do and therefore they are able to be content. So with that, if you are born begging on the streets, you die begging on the streets, and you don’t try to make a better life for yourself. Because of this the beggars look at you as if you owe them something, that our duty as the privileged people is to feed them and give them spare change. I haven’t yet looked in to the social support that the government offers the impoverished, or if they offer them anything, as I assume that they get no support. But for the most part it’s clear that due to this mind set that the country as a whole shares social mobility is difficult, if not impossible, so maybe it is our duty to help these people on the streets?

Unfortunately I don’t buy it at all, and I feel bad that I don’t. I theoretically understand why things are the way they are, that these people don’t understand that there are other options, but I don’t think I emotionally can contend with it because it seems so irrational. And I feel guilty; because I think like this because I have been offered education that these people can only dream about. At the heart of the matter I think my issue is that I know that these people begging on the street are not trying to help themselves and not trying rectify their social standing, so I can in no way feel right about supporting them. Perhaps that mindset makes me a total jerk, as in no foreseeable future is their government going to help make social mobility a much more manageable task, but for the time being that’s where I’m at.

In other news, we’ve now come to the end of the second week of classes here. It’s an odd feeling of elementary school infused with college level material. All of the students have to show up at 9:30 in the morning for our first class, which is international development Monday through Wednesday. This class is taught in lecture format and has thus far basically focused on the economics of international development. It’s slightly difficult to listen to a lecture in a foreign accent but the material is rather interesting. The most interesting aspect is that this class is being taught in a developing country, by a native of that country. I find it interesting and informative because in a class like this in the States a student would have to take in to account that the class is probably being taught with an American self-superiority complex perspective. Instead, I get the perspective of the premiere developing country (okay, okay so they are neck and neck with China, but I’m in India so I’m allowed to show some loyalty). Our second class of the day is Hindi. This has been quite difficult. A lot of things don’t really translate, such as ‘thank-you’. They have a word for ‘thank-you’, but it is not to be used as liberally, or in the same circumstances that we use it for. For example, if I were to invite you over for dinner I would thank you for allowing me to be hospitable to you; you wouldn’t thank me for the dinner. So that’s a whole different culture-language boundary as we are trained to say thank-you for just about everything. Our final class of the day is a country-analysis class, which so far has just chronicled the history of India. It’s told sort of in storybook fashion with lots of digressions, but overall quite interesting.

Aforementioned I noted that it felt a little like elementary school. We keep the schedule I detailed Monday through Wednesday, with a tea break between the first two classes, a lunch between the second two, and tea served during the third. On Thursdays, at least so far, we have watched Bollywood films in replacement of our country analysis class and international development class. Bollywood films are quite the treat. Technologically speaking they are on par, the biggest difference is the writing and the acting. In a Bollywood film, the cheesier the better. Every obnoxious look, or inspirational line, or ridiculously cliché and tear jerking ending is sure to be written in. Thus, overacting goes hand in hand with this style. They are sure zoom in on every over acted expression. The best part about these films is how much the Indian people don’t really seem to find them corny, but rather they think they are fabulous. When we have watched them at our host family’s house (well when I have watched them watch them as they don’t watch their tv with subtitles) every member of the family is glued to the television and laugh and cry at all of the appropriate times. I’d suggest you put a Bollywood film in the netflix queue so you can just experience these films for yourself.

So Friday is fully of Bollywood loving, and Friday we have Hindi class and then a field trip. Last week we went to a papermaking factory that distributes beautiful hand made paper to companies like Wal-Mart. It is a little unnerving to see face to face those people who you have heard your whole life about who do back breaking labor for about two dollars a day. When we asked our professors about it they didn’t seem too disturbed by it, but I guess that is just the reality of life here. And apparently that is a livable salary? Anyways, today we are going to a factory that makes prosthetic legs. While they haven’t completely explained the purpose of these trips I think the idea is to show us organizations and businesses in the area as in a month we will all be placed in our internships for the remainder of the semester.

Culture Shock

After over a week of being here, the honeymoon period has finally worn off and the reality of actually living here is beginning to set in. One of the classes I am taking is “Connecting Your Abroad Experience to Your Future”, entirely cheesy, but nonetheless kind of cool. It’s online and not all of the students here opted to take it. It consists of weekly readings about culture shock, adjusting, so in essence of bunch of articles pertaining to how we are ‘feeling’. There are then about four assignments that force us to do some introspection and internalizing of our experience. Moral of the story is it’s an easy credit hour. But I digress… one of the readings for this week chronicled the stages of culture shock and since reading the article it’s interesting to evaluate where each of the students is on the culture shock scale and see how different people deal with the culture shock phenomenon. Some people are very ready to disassociate themselves with everything ‘American’ and almost equate being ‘American’ with negativity. Other people find themselves in a sort of stasis, a feeling a paralysis because they just don’t really know what to do with themselves or how to associate with this new place. And even others can’t help but fixating on what we don’t have here and how ‘great’ it is at home. All of these, according to the article, I would classify in stage one or stage two of culture shock, which is simply put the time between initial excitement and a reality check. And let me tell you, being in the stage of realizing that this is my life for the next four months going to live isn’t just a walk in the park. It’s a constant emotional rollercoaster. I’m trying to appreciate everything, but not romanticize it, but also not compare it to what I know and what I have at home, so in essence I am trying to do the impossible, which is clearly draining.

Aside from the adjustment issues I have now finally moved in to the host family that I will be staying with for the next six weeks during the classroom phase. I’m living in a large house with that has been passed down through a family; it has about twenty bedrooms. The house has been split up in to three sections, one side of the house is for the younger brother, one side for the older brother, and the back area is for tenants. I’m on the older brother’s side of the house with Jocelyn. Two other girls from our program, Lydia and Dede, are on the younger brother’s side of the house. Each brother has two children, a boy and a girl, and beyond those four children there are the tenants or relatives, or whoever else milling around the house. The family is a very traditional Hindi family with the whole arranged marriage bit, which I’m interested to learn more about from my host sister.

The best part of living with a host family is being treated like a small child again, in the best way. The mother home-cooks all of our meals, and even packs lunch boxes for us to take to school. And let me tell you, home cooked Rajasthani dishes are to die for. Breakfast, thus far, has been this delicious breakfast bread with onions and seasonings, that I forgot the name of, or seasoned corn, and a side of chai. Lunch and dinners consist generally of a chapatti, which is a circular unleavened bread, a vegetable in some delicious Indian seasonings, and either a lentil soup or a curd yogurt dish. The food has been spicy, but not too spicy. The nice thing about spicy food is that you don’t really have the ambition to over eat because it takes so long to eat. I think I’ve probably already lost five pounds. Thus far there has been no meat in my diet since I have arrived. I got lucky and my host family is ‘non-veg’, aka they eat meat, a rarity in these parts. Apparently those who do eat meat only do so once in a blue moon. So hopefully I’ll get lucky and be served some delicious carnivorous fare one these days.

As for my accommodations, I have my own room that is attached to Jocelyn’s room and a bathroom. So it’s quite nice that we have all of this space to ourselves to get away and have some solitude in this bustling place. We were blessed with a western toilet, a genuine cause for celebration. However, we were not blessed with a shower, and instead will be taking bucket showers. Initially I was pretty apprehensive about this, it sounded like quite a task. But after taking a few I almost kind of like it. For those of you who are a still a little confused about what a bucket shower actually is, let me explain. We have a larger bucket that we fill maybe about a quarter full. There is a little bucket inside of that that we then use to pour the water on ourselves. There is then a drain on the floor for all the water to drain our. So it’s basically like a shower but you have much more control of how much water is actually used. It’s shocking how little water it actually takes to get clean. My first real shower after I have after moving out of here I feel like is going to freak me out of how much water I am wasting.

For the most part, even with the continual culture shock and longing for American amenities, we are starting to feel at home here. Our classes have all officially begun and our lives are starting to get an Indian rhythm. It should be noted that the Indian life style is much more laid back than American life-styles, so therefore our newly adopted tempo is much more wishy washy and informal than that of being at school at the good ol’ U of I. We expect our 4 time a day chai, we expect delays, and we expect the unexpected. Yet, I’m trying not to get too comfortable, because I’m sure India has a lot more to throw at me.

Finally in India!

Soo I decided to switch my blog site since the travelblog site was sub par. So I'm first pasting my initial posting here..

July is quickly coming to a close. This July signified the end of my teenage years, something that I was not exactly looking forward to, thus we attempted to play it under the radar. Within my group of friends over the past year when any of us reaches the milestone of entering their twenties we like to point out what that actually means. The twenties are traditionally the decade in which we graduate from our undergrad college years, pick up some graduate degrees, start a career, fall in love, get married, perhaps even pop out a few children. From where I am standing even the mere thought of such things makes my stomach hurt and my anxiety grow. But alas, it can't really be as horrible as I make it out to be?

While July did offer excitement in that regard in addition to the general self-created drama and dwellings, and trips out west, I'd put money on August blowing July's mind. I've been planning this trip since February, but due to my lack of planning skills and my lack of taking in to account the fact that after plans are made action does indeed follow, I haven't really yet contended with the fact that this is actually happening. So now to be more direct. On August 29th I will be flying out of the O'Hare airport and landing in the lovely land of spices in New Delhi, India. I will be remaining in that foreign land until Christmas Eve and then flying back to the states for a very cold welcome home. Whilst in India I will be participating in a study abroad program that is sponsored by the University of Minnesota. For this semester I essentially will be a student at University of Minnesota. To the best of my knowledge we will first be spending a week in New Delhi for an orientation and then we will be shipped over to our new home Jaipur. There each the students, about 23, will be placed with their homestay and move in to their new homes. While in Jaipur all the students will be taking classes together that pertain to globalization and developing nations. Of course, the cool aspect of these courses is we will be drop dead in the middle of a developing country that is feeling that word 'globalization' daily. Having already taken an experiential learning class earlier this summer Yellowstone , I am very excited to be able to use my cultural immersion as an extension of class learning to fully understand these concepts and their impact. After the first half of the semester classes come to a close, the second half of the semester each student will be placed in an internship relating to development in a field that highlights their interests. As I am an environmental studies minor I plan on finding an internship that deals with the environmental impact side. At the end of the program it is my understanding that we all come together one last time and write a paper about our experiences and such. All and all the structure and the goals of the program seem to be the makings for a life changing experience, and one that I am very excited and open to having.

When telling people about my study abroad program and what not I generally get to about this point and with a kind of confused look on their face they ask apprehensively, "So, why would you ever choose India? Why not Europe? I would never want to go spend a semester in India." I suppose I understand that to an extent. In most people's minds the idea of going abroad is going to a place like Europe where they can party and eat cheese and just consequentially learn about another culture. That is all honorable in itself, it is a great experience and while Europe is westernized, the various countries still maintain their own definable traits, and therefore the students that choose to go there do see a lot and learn a lot. What I wanted was something a little bit more. I wanted my culture and the way I view to world to be thrown on its head. I wanted to go to a country where maybe women aren't equal I suppose the same thing could be argued in America, but that is clearly for a differently motivated blog , where things that I find to be casual are formal, where values are completely different. I wanted this because this life, no matter how old we are or where we are, the overarching question is, "How do we get along?", a question that humanity has been struggling with since day one. A contributing factor to this is our inability to understand others values or even more difficultly to respect one each others’ values. My hope is that by going to a place that is so different from my own country that I will be able to learn about their values and cultures and respect them and perhaps even realize that they aren't so different from our own. In this global economy I believe that this cultural understanding will become a marketable skill in my future. Furthermore, the components of the program itself are pretty awesome. As I already said I have taken an experiential learning class and it was awesome, so I am really excited to really hands on learn about developing nations.

So now as August sneaks closer it is finally the time the wrap together all of the loose ends and mentally prepare as much as possible for what I am getting myself in to. There will be lots of doctors appointments, hair appointments, shopping sprees, and the dreaded packing. I haven't ever moved farther than 10 minutes away, so moving half way around the world is rather daunting. Everyone keeps asking me if I'm excited. I never really know how to answer that question. It's not that I'm not excited, it just that I have no mental image in my head of what my life will be like for the next four months or what really any of it will be like. So I don't really feel excited in the hyperactive sense. I am excited to go have an awesome experience and finally leave Champaign for an extended period of time. All I know is that this is going to be a great adventure.


And now what you've all been waiting for, my new post...

It’s finally Saturday and I have now been in this new and fantastical place since Monday night. It really is a whole new world. Nowhere in the states can you look out your window and see a camel, an elephant, a Mercedes, a huge corporate building, and a naked man all at the same time. There is no central air conditioning; just certain rooms are certain buildings have air conditioning. With that being said I’m attempting to teach myself to enjoy sweating, convince myself it’s a good thing and focus on the toxins that my body is constantly releasing. It’s also dirty. We just left a stay at beautiful brand new hotel and even though this is a stunning place on the inside, when you walk outside there are still piles of trash; there are piles of trash everywhere. And the traffic, the traffic makes Chicago’s rush hour look like child’s play. No one drives in the lanes or even pretends to. On the high way one of my favorite signs read, “lane driving is sane driving”, a suggestion that is in no way heeded. On top of that the traffic consists of cars, rickshaws, elephants, camels, horses, and motorcycles. Our first attempt at crossing the street was definitely an embarrassing adventure of white girls running across the street for dear life. Yet, with all of those things, this place is amazing. Chai, which directly translates to “tea”, is served breakfast, lunch, and dinner, during class, after class, and all the time. It’s a beautiful way to just stop and take a minute to regroup. The people are so friendly and so interested in us and so ready to tell us about their lives and their experiences. And amongst all of the chaos these people seem to be genuinely happy. While all of these perceptions have been developed only over a short week’s time this place thus far has only made me want to learn more about it and really understand the way of life.

On Sunday my parents drove me to O’Hare and said goodbye for four whole months. This felt slightly strange, as I have never left home for that long of duration before. At the airport I met the majority of the students that will be studying with me for the semester. This program did a great job of attracting really interesting people that have a deep passion for helping the world. Their knowledge and conviction for this is almost intimidating, but I’m sure that they will be able to teach me a lot. We are all already becoming great friends and it’s been amazing to hear about the adventures these people have been on doing things such as teaching in Guatemala for a year, or studying in South Africa for a semester, even to making hilarious “vlogs”, which are video blogs (yes Ellen I plan on linking to your videos once I find them).

So on to what you all are most interested in hearing about, yes I am alive and well in India, and no it doesn’t smell terrible, per se. On our lovely fourteen-hour flight between the sleeping and the arbitrary conversations the question of what to expect was brought up. I personally had negligible expectations. I hadn’t really done much of any research on India and tried not to help keep my expectations to a minimum. The two things that stuck with me was a girl on my trip telling me that the first thing I was going to notice getting off the plane was the smell, the other being what my friend Brie had been joking about since I got accepted to the program. She was convinced that as soon as I stepped off the plane and the Indians laid their eyes on me their first reaction would be, “Holy Shit!”, said of course in her best Indian-English accent. Stepping off the plane in to the airport there was a scent, not a super harsh scent, but an unfamiliar one. I then braced myself for the out of doors, thinking that perhaps that’s where this fabled odor was waiting for me. So after we got through customs (which was surprisingly easy and very quick) we found our group and got our first whiff of fresh Indian air. My roommate for the semester, Jocelyn, and I both found that this scent was actually kind of pleasing, like a sweetly flavored cigar. I will be honest and say that this sweet scent has not been uniform throughout Delhi and Jaipur; there are lots of very strong fragrances, some are rather abrasive while others are just new and different. That aforementioned garbage definitely adds a nice pungent odor from time to time.

Classes have not yet officially started. Yesterday was the culmination of our orientation to India and today we will finally moved in to our host families. We spent the first two nights in Delhi at a YWCA hostel, and spent three nights in the lovely Saneer Hotel. This hotel is brand new and immaculate. The wait staff has been nothing but friendly and the food is delicious. We attempted to really enjoy our last western showers before our to our host families where the majority of us, myself included, will get the privilege of enjoying bucket showers for the duration of our stay there. That thought is both intimidating and exciting at the same time. I say exciting because I did come here to experience all the nuances of this culture and this place and if a bucket shower is part of this then so be it.

Speaking of culture, my new favorite aspect of the Indian culture is how blunt the people are. They are not afraid to tell you that you are fat, skinny, tall, short, black, white, you name it. These observations are not perceived as rude in their culture, rather they are merely what they should be, observations. My roommate Jocelyn was signing for her cell phone, and along with the cell phone we had to provide a passport photo. The man looked from her to the photo, from her to the photo, with confusion, and stated, “you look different in picture”. She obligingly shook her head and noted that her hair was pulled back in the photo and that now it was down. The man starred at her and proclaimed, “No! That not it! You skinny in picture, now you very, very fat!”. Being the good sport she is, she laughed and questioned if that was a good thing, and the man contended that indeed it was “very, very good!”.

My personal experience with this observatory trait was not quite as ridiculous, but I found amusing nonetheless. A man had to take me to the photo shop to get more passport pictures as I had not sent in enough. So in true Indian fashion he asked me all about my life, what my major was, what year in school I was, where I was from, what my parents do for a living. He concluded the interrogation by saying, “You sixteen or seventeen?”, I smiled and shook my head and told him that no, I was twenty. He responded utterly shocked, “TWENTY? You look like you sixteen! You have the figure of sixteen!”. I laughed, which of course is the only reaction one can have. I have no idea if that’s a good thing, but now we have a house of a girl that is too young and one that is too fat.

We finally man-ed up an went for our first shopping trip. Our first venture out in the nearby marketplace, basically a couple streets of shops called “Rajapark”, was quite intimidating and we didn’t even consider purchasing any thing and were too overwhelmed by the number of shops and people and chaos. Yesterday we went back with a vengeance, and motivation as we are all running out of clothes and ready to say peace-out to our far too hot jeans. A group of about five girls took on the shops, but of course it would be an utter lie to say that we did this with confidence. It’s confusing to know when to barter and when the prices that they are offering you are fair. My friend Olivia and I finally entered a shop that had quite a few cute cortas, tunic-y tops that are generally accompanied by some color of leggings. We went in to the shop and saw some that we liked, and not having a clue what kind of price to pay for one attempted to barter. This just pissed off the owners because apparently it was set pricing. How one is supposed to know if something is set priced or not I haven’t a clue. After that epic fail we decided to just go to the place that the girls that have been here for a month have been going and decided that the owner offered legit prices. We all know how much I hate to shop but I’m a little nervous that this is going to become an addiction. The shopkeeper treats each customer like a goddess and takes out everything and measures you and etc, etc. I made it out of that shop with a sweet pink and orange tie dye skirt, a scarf, two cortas and leggings. Speaking of leggings, from what we have so far found we are not the biggest fan on the leggings that are sold here. The leggings that both Jocelyn and I bought, and from different locations, seemed to have the issue of front butt. As in they are not spandex-y enough to actually be form fitting. SOOOO if anyone wants to send me some good ol’ fashioned American leggings I would be so much more inclined to send you something back… (hint, hint).

So with all of this excitement, today is the day that I finally move in to my homestay. Hopefully that will go over smoothly…