A day in the life: September 4th

Yesterday started without rain and before my alarm went off. Conveniently it also started with WiFi, so I was able to see my emails, send a couple Facebook messages, and catch up on QC. It was also my first day with my yoga mat, which meant I did a sun salutation and free body weight exercises for the first time in weeks. Then I met with Soren and Casey and we took a rickshaw to school, where Casey climbed up in a tree to meditate (I wish I took a picture, but unfortunately you'll have to exercise your imagination; perhaps you can borrow my yoga mat).

At breakfast we talked about the fact that the US is putting more troops in Iraq, and no one seemed surprised given that ISIS had massacred a bunch of people. I had thought that Americans were currently very skeptical of increasing involvement in foreign affairs anywhere, but perhaps public opinion shifted. It's very strange not being intimately connected to the US socio-blogosphere while I'm here; even Google News gives me India news primarily.

The outward-looking conscious mood of thought continued to our first class, where we talked about everything from Nehru's “Tryst with destiny” speech to farmer suicides to election turnouts to the Naxalite movement. The class started with two students doing short presentations on the readings, and the second presentation gave us a bunch of discussion questions which we discussed until thirty minutes after the class was supposed to end. My second class was Intermediate Hindi, and it's a one-on-one tutoring session because I'm the only one in the program who had taken any Hindi before. After that I wasn't thinking about international affairs at all because I was stuffing grammar into my brain.

Then, for lunch, Soren, Julia, and I went to CocoBerry, which is on the main road (Ferguson College Road) a short distance away. In case you couldn't guess from the name, it's a froyo place. Even more amazing, the froyo was all fruit-flavored. (For those of you who don't know, I have a deep abiding distrust of yogurt flavored like deserts rather than fruit. I don't know what people put in cheesecake froyo, but I'm pretty sure it's not actual cheesecake juice.)

Lychee, chocolate, green apple, blueberry froyo: A++ selection.

Besides froyo, the place had all sorts of American food. Mission-style burritos and burrito bowls from the west coast, bagels from the east... Basically, it's perfect. I want to go back. This is how we all felt about it:

Soren and I switched faces, and that's why she's so much more excited than me.

After lunch, we had to go home for the day to meet a police officer who is supposed to check to make sure we're all living where we say we are. Casey, Soren, and I got in a rickshaw...but halfway home we got a text message saying the police wasn't coming that day. Soren stopped the rickshaw and went back to the program center; Casey and I continued home because there's a phone store and we needed to put money on our phones, and after we did that we went to Big Bazaar.

I got a scarf at Big Bazaar. Or perhaps the scarf got me.

Big Bazaar is basically the Indian equivalent of WalMart. I got a scarf and jeans for a total of, like, $15, and afterward got a veg hotdog at this place called “My Kitchen” which is between Big Bazaar and my house. Casey had gone to the program center and back and then we studied Hindi for a bit. My teacher had given me a children's book to practice reading, and Casey sounded out the letters she'd learned in Beginning Hindi while I read simple phrases. We got (black, sugarfree Assam) tea from my host family, and then she went home.

The children's book's Hindi exercises

To top off the day, my didi (who is technically my second cousin but in my family's India we call our older cousins older siblings) came to visit, along with dada and dadi, who are her grandparents. We all shared sweets with my host parents and tried to talk in Hindi (though dadi spoke almost no English and I speak almost no Hindi, so we made do). We even tried to take a selfie! But not all of us fit in a picture, so here's one of my family and me taken by my host parents:

Me, Konica didi, Dada, Dadi

Now for the interactive portion: How much did you travel yesterday? That includes commuting to work and school or any shopping excursions or strange detours.