I am here...

Last night, 10pm Saturday, December 29th, 2007

It is 10pm on Saturday December 29th and I have been in India for 2 days. It feels like it's been at least 2 weeks. It's amazing how emotions change from morning to night: during the day it seems fine, certainly strange, but come the night time and I am an absolute wreck. India is intense; really intense. I am living in a home stay with a family that has a father, mother, and a daughter--but the daughter does not live with us. There are two other CIEE students living with me here: Arlita who is from Maine, and TIm who is from St. Louis. The father of my family, whose name is Ramanarasinhum (no abbreviation allowed, always the full thing) is a teacher of Telugu (the language spoken here, yes meaning my Hindi is literally useless), and the mother, who we call Amma (meaning mother in Telugu), speaks no English or Hindi--only Telugu. The daughter's name is Srilakshmi and she recently got married. The family has had CIEE foreign students for the past two years straight, and they are excited to have us.

However, the experience so far with the family has not been exactly what I expected. The father is leaving in 2 weeks to go teach in Chicago for the rest of the semester, and the mother is following him there in February. Their daughter and her husband are apparently going to come live with us when the mother leaves, which I am hoping will be okay. It is really too bad that they are leaving because they are both really nice: the father has been telling us about Telugu, Hinduism, Advaita, and eating etiquette (if you can call it that at all). It is strange because Amma stands around us at the table when we are eating and just serves us food and urges more and more on us, but I have yet to see her eat herself once. They have a servant who washes the floors and does house stuff i think and will do our laundry (we have to pay her of course) but we were never introduced to her (as though she isn't really a person with a name).

The house is neither small nor large, but there are all these little rooms that are for prayer only. It is also dirty; though they seem to wash the floors almost everyday, and yet the sinks and covered in dirt and plates only get a quick luke-warm rinse! Food is There are no utensils at all. none. not for soup, not for rice, not for curry, not for yogurt. We sit down for our first dinner last night and all stair at our plates not knowing what to do. So our father shows us: you pile your rice in the center, and with your right hand ONLY you mush one kind of curry or whatever it is up so it is like a paste, then you take little chunks in your fingers and scoop them into your mouth, flicking it with your thumb. This is the process for all food. With yogurt--apparently an Indian meal is not complete with your portion of yogurt and rice (!!). Anyway, the food is interesting because it all has some strange taste to it--like it is almost really good, but they added one too many spices or something. It all has this bitter taste to it, that I think is the Southern Indian flavor. Not nearly as good as North Indian food (which is what we eat in the States at an Indian restaurant).

So the hardest parts are the eating and the living situation, but amazingly they are both also pretty cool because they are teaching me things about Indian life that I would not have learned, living in the dorms or the American students house. It is definitely harder to be here, but we are three of us and we have our own floor in the house and each with our own room. Our rooms all open onto a terrace-hallway thingy that has a wicker chair hanging from the ceiling. At the moment it is all under construction and they say it will be done in a week, but I don't know If i believe them. We'll see how quickly it gets done..as in, if it's ever done before we leave.