Chai and Aloo are My Lifeblood

Namaste,

I returned yesterday from Bharatpur, Rajasthan home to the Ghana Keoleodo Bird Sanctuary. I went with two other girls from my program and we spent a whole morning biking through the sanctuary meeting deer, monkeys, jackals, huge lizards, cows, egrets, storks, parrots, and one injured turtle.

The rest of the journey however, was not as relaxing as the Sanctuary. We ended up getting tickets for a bus that went through Bharatpur, but did not stop there, even though the person who sold us the tickets told us that the bus would make a stop there. We ended up in Agra and enlisted the help of a hotel-owner/French-Indian man to help us get a taxi back to Bharatpur. Because we didn't know anything about the man or the hotel, Nancy made up a story saying that Whitney and I were married to her older Indian brothers who would pick us up in Bharatpur.

Lying has become a really fun part of being an outsider. You never really want to give your information out, so you make things up. Right now I am Dizzy from Nova Scotia. But I think that I will research Tasmania to see if I could pull off being from there. Overall, it's best not to say you're American, because everyone wants an American contact. Nova Scotia not so popular.

The Hindi is coming slowly and I miss Spanish. Granted I was never good at Spanish, but I could make myself understood. Now, I have about 4 sentences that people understand. After that I just string vocab together. It is a little isolating to not have the language skills that you want. I feel very much like an American who is just spending a lot of time in Jaipur. I don't feel like I understand Jaipur or the culture here as well as I would like to. I am going to try to get a library pass to Rajasthan University's library. I figure that "Raj U" students will probably be safer to talk to than rickshaw wallas or the boys who sell puppets outside of the Raj Mandir Theatre on M.I. Road. Most of all I wish I did not look so physically different. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a zoo.

Although it seems from the post that things aren't going well, they really are. It is just difficult to go from being a mostly-independent college student in Minnesota to asking your Indian host family for permission each time you leave the house.

There are some things that I do love about India and I already know that I will miss. The first two are Chair and Aloo (potato.) My Mamaji's chai is the best that I've had here, especially the ginger chai. Potatoes are also amazing. I can't exactly explain what makes them so good, but I think that they're just very good comfort food.

India has challenged a lot of my rituals. For example, I'm used to working out about 5 days a week at home. Here, I'm lucky if I have time to go. If I do have time then I am followed around by a trainer. I'm used to just going where I want to go regardless of the time, but now my Mamaji gets worried if I'm out in the dark. It's just hard for me to be intimidated by a block-long walk in the dark after I've walked block after block in New York in the dark. The difference is that most Indians stay at home at night, so there aren't the crowds that NYC has.

Well for now I have to write a paper before the Internet cafe closes. I just found out that my grades will not be seen on my Carleton transcript and cannot go into my GPA. This will be an interesting paper.

Love,

Erica