One Day at a Time...
Today I splurged a bit and enjoyed a really good treat with my lunch: Dr. Pepper! Bottled in Texas and imported over here. It was a nice (though expensive) taste from home, and a good reward for a week worth of language learning. We finally found someone to help us learn Hindi and started our lessons on Monday. I didn't know what to expect at first, but it's turned out to be really great. My roommate goes in the morning, and I go about 4 pm everyday, and then afterwards I head over to the gym. I met our teacher (Ms Maanju) through my friend from the gym (it's her mom), so it's all worked out very nicely. I've been learning all sorts of important things this week, like Main ne kal baal dhoye (yesterday I washed my hair) and Hurray purde buncaro (close the green curtains). My favorite is peeli beeli, which means yellow cat. It's just fun to say :)
It's nice to finally feel settled and like we're busy doing something. Learning Hindi is an adventure, but it's good because it's keeping us busy and it's the first step in helping us to connect with the University students we're going to be working with here. This past week has been really good because I've finally started to feel like I'm really living here, not just hanging out or visiting, which is good because I've been here almost 2 months(!). It is an adjustment though--ordinary things like shopping and cooking and washing just take longer here. For example: I have to remember to turn on the hot water heater (that's for you dad :) ) about 10 minutes before I want to take a shower; before we can eat vegetables, we have to soak them in bleach water or potassium permanginade (which main ingredient is "poison") for 20 minutes so we don't get sick; every time we wash, everything has to be hung up to dry and then ironed because we don't have a dryer (though thankfully, we do now have a washer!). None of this is bad--it's actually been really good to learn to slow down, but also a challenge because I'm such a multi-tasker!
This past weekend was fun: we went to a traditional Indian dance performance Saturday night, which was very interesting, and Sunday night we went to a concert. We also went to see another movie this week, which according to our teacher is very good for language practice :) There wasn't much English at all, so we struggled to follow the plot, but I did notice that I recognized more of the words, which was encouraging. Today we're going shopping for fun, and hopefully by the travel agent's office to book our tickets for our January conference in Thailand. And then hopefully a relaxing weekend :) Hope yours is as well--I'm out!