First week

Now that I have figured out how blogspot works, settled upon a blog title that would be easy for everyone to remember and that wasn't already taken, and finally found some time to write, I am sitting at my desk in my apartment in Pune, writing my first blog post ever.  I was hesitant to do this, but I decided this was the best way to keep in touch with everyone.  Also, I've always enjoyed reading the blogs of people I know who are traveling, even if I don't know them well, so I figured I'd do it too.  I'll try to post once a week or so, and then at the end of the post I'll put a link to my picasa page where you can see pictures of what I am talking about.  The entries would be too long if I put all my pictures in them now.  

I got to India a little over a week ago.  As soon as I stepped onto my Air India flight in New York I felt like I was already here: it was uncomfortably hot and smelled like curry.  After a very long flight and an intensely jet-lagged night and day in Bombay that doesn't even seem real in retrospect because I was so out of it, I caught a 2 hour bus to Pune, which is the small city I will live in for the next two months.  The area of Bombay that I saw was pretty filthy, but Pune is cleaner and more orderly by comparison (though it's all relative here), and people here are incredibly friendly.  I think it's because there are hardly any tourists around and we are still kind of a novelty.  In both Bombay and Pune the streets are constantly jammed with streams of people walking back and forth, honking rickshaws, motorbikes, food stalls vendors, everything.  It's kind of insane.  It looks like total anarchy, but it isn't.  In Pune there are also stray dogs everywhere, and most of them actually look pretty clean and cute, although you can't touch them.  And they all kind of look the same, like some kind of Indian stray breed.  They seem pleasant enough; they generally just ignore people.  I've heard the dogs in Varanasi can be pretty nasty.

The neighborhood I am staying in is very middle class and tidy.  There are trees everywhere, and the streets are relatively quiet, and they are cleaned frequently, which those of you who have been to India know is a big deal.  My apartment is big, and I have a small private balcony where I can sit and watch a flock of green parrots that lives in the trees around my building.  There are also fruit bats that circle the house at dusk.  If you've never seen a fruit bat, let me assure you that they are BIG.  The wing span is at least two feet, and they swoop slowly in the air like hawks.  The British call them flying foxes, and if you imagine a fox with wings you pretty much have an idea of how big they are.  Good thing they are completely vegetarian.  Unfortunately, by the time they come out it's too dark for me to take pictures of them, so you'll have to take my word for it.  Or google it.

I'm living with two other people who are in the same program with me, and we finally caved in two days ago and did what the people at the program have been strongly recommending since we got here: we got a maid.  We pay her about $50 a month to clean our house, do the laundry, and cook.  $50 a month may not seem like much, but it's hard to express how cheap everything is here.  A meal costs about $1.50, my rent is only $150 a month, and I had three shirts and a pair of pants tailor-made for me from scratch for about $45.  So she's actually making decent money for 1-2 hours of work a day.  And you know what?  It's great having a maid.  She makes really good home cooked Indian food, which is much lighter than the restaurant food.  She speaks not a word of English and none of us speak a word of the local language, Marathi, so it's pretty much point-and-smile with her.  It works.

On weekday mornings I get a rickshaw to the campus (20 minute ride--costs about $1), and we have class from 9 to 1, when we break for lunch.  Then we have the afternoon free.  The classes are taught in Sanskrit, and it's pretty difficult.  All the teachers are young Indian women who are completely fluent in Sanskrit, which still blows my mind.  They can just ramble on and on if they want to, but they slow down for us.  Part of our schedule for the summer includes personal tutorials where we will read a text that we choose ourselves.  I picked a text on philosophy of language by a guy named Bhartṛhari, which I would be happy to talk about with anyone who is interested, but which I won't describe in this blog because it would be way too boring.  

The picasa page will also have pictures of a big religious procession we attended this week. The festival was in honor of a local 13th century saint, Tukaram Maharaj, who was a religious leader and a poet who is considered one of the fathers of Marathi literature.  He was an advisor to king Chatrapati Shivaji, who was the king of the Maratha empire at the time and is also a local hero.  There are statues of Shivaji everywhere and the airport in Bombay is named after him.  The festival was fun, I guess.  Mostly just a lot of Hindus walking by carrying statues.  The drumming was great though, and the oxen pulling the ceremonial carts all had their horns painted and decorated with flowers, which I thought was pretty cool.  

So all in all, I'm doing well and it should be a good summer.  One of the only real difficulties I have had so far, other than not speaking Marathi, is the difference in body language.  By an odd twist of fate, it has come about that our way of saying no with our heads--shaking them side to side--looks just like the classic Indian head waggle, which is one of those all-purpose cultural gestures, like the word prego in Italian, that means a million different things but somehow never means "no".  So I am always being offered things, and then when I try to smile and shake my head to say "no" because I don't speak Marathi, they think I am making a big "YES!" gesture, and they go ahead and give me whatever they were offering.  I never noticed how much I rely on body language until I got here.

I guess that's it for now.  Most of the posts probably won't be this long, but this is the first post and I feel like it doesn't even cover a fraction of the things I have seen and done in the few days I've been here.  I'll post again in a week or so, or maybe sooner if something happens.  

And I'll add the link to the picasa page as soon as I get it set up.

UPDATE - Click here for pictures.  Someone let me know if it doesn't work.