Dear America,
As much as I want to talk about my various public transportation catching misfortunes, bicycle problems, and continuing quest for classes, (and then I'll talk about all my exciting trips to the store to buy batteries and train
missing experiences).
(India has decided to double space my post yet again.) I've been following all the protests going on in Egypt and Libya pretty faithfully, and I know that protests happen all the time, but it seems like this year is an especially revolutionary year, maybe because there are so many other protests happening close to home. The Telengana separatist movement has been getting increasingly intense (I'm still safe). There was another bandh last week, meaning the city was shut down by vigilante protesters for 48 hours, and all my classes were cancelled. Then there was the rail roko, which halted all local trains for an entire day. And I didn't mention this before because I was worried about presenting it with the gravity it deserves, but people have committed suicide as a political statement for this cause. Employees and students are striking, sit-ins are being staged everywhere, people are throwing rocks, police have used tear gas. There were a bunch of workers sitting outside the university gate yesterday and police milling around everywhere (not actually sure if its related though. I asked a guard and he said "Nothing is going on. Nothing is there!" the first definitive answer I have ever gotten in India: a completely inaccurate statement which actually means "Get away now, and don't ask questions.") According to the news, the final push is going to be a million person march into Hyderabad where they will lay siege to the city (yes, the article literally says "siege"). But I don't even know if it will be the real "final push" because the Srikrishna committee was supposed to have made a final decisive pronouncement in January. Things just keep getting pushed back. I've been careful not to express support for either side because it's not my fight/I'm supposed to be an ambassador for America/people are so passionate about it, but it's a very exciting time to be in Hyderabad.
Meanwhile, students at Dickinson just staged a massive protest to improve the school's policy on sexual violence, and I'm a little disappointed that I couldn't be there to take part in it (being Feminist Jesse and all). I'm just so excited about it because from what I gather, both side handled it really well, and it looks like Dickinson has already made a lot of concessions.
Now on to to more mundane: public transportation. I could say it was an unlucky week, but instead I'm going to say it was an adventurous week. While England has no visibly marked addresses, there are no road signs in India, and most people (including drivers) don't know where most things are, so I can't really go places without getting lost. But everyone in India is lost, so I'm never really lost. I had four or five bus adventures (lost, stranded, or otherwise detoured transportation mishaps) and two blown bike tires this week, so I'm just going to narrate one. I decided to take the local train to the park to play frisbee. So after getting up the requisite 2 hours early, battling a small zombie infestation (I know that sounds nasty, but there is no other way to describe the line for train tickets. There is a large crowd of men that push each other out the way to get to the front. I kid you not, one man actually grabbed another man around the middle and tried to lift him out of the way. And then about 12 people try to shove their hands into the little one person ticket hole at the front of the line while everyone continuously shouts their destination rhythmically, which begins to sound a little like a "braaaaains" chant), shoving our way onto the unlabeled train (we were lucky enough to find space in the toilet bay), my travel buddy, Judith, and I discovered that the train was going in the opposite direction of the park. Yes, we had gotten on the same train on the same track at the same time the last time we went to the park, but this is India; we should have known better. So after passing Gullaguda (a place that sounds suspiciously like the island homeland of the yellow polliwog from one of my favorite 90s Nickelodeon shows), we got off at the next stop, a random deserted field an hour outside of Hyderabad. We began to panic when all the sudden we heard a glorious sound... "Hallo? HALLOOOOOOO!!!! Where you are going, madams?!" ... the sound of a confused Indian man wondering what the two idiot white girls are doing at a deserted train station. After convincing him that we would rather take the 20 extra steps required to walk on the stairs over the train track rather than climbing down into the sharp, rusty pit to walk directly over the sets of operating train tracks, we met him on the other side and explained that we needed to get back to Hyderabad. Luckily, he was extremely friendly. He invited us into the control room for chai, told us his entire life story, showed us pictures of his grand kid, talked about the wonders of Jesus (this happens a lot. People seem to equate white people with super-duper Christianity), and sent us on our merry way back to Lingampalli. One great thing about India: higher ratio of entire-life-story-upon-meeting-you people. So, yes, I guess I could say I got lost 5 or 6 times, that my bike broke, and that I got attacked by zombies, or I could say I am still successfully surviving Indian public transportation, I fixed my bike, and I defeated several zombies.
Instead of going on a long trip this week I've been having a lot of miniadventures (most involving getting lost, actually involving India getting lost and changing the relativity of my geographic position through no fault of my own). I got to jumped on several rapidly accelerating buses this week, which is pretty much the equivalent of eating an apple pie at a baseball game in America. I'm basically assimilated. And I drove a motorcycle (in an empty parking lot for 8 seconds. It counts). Because my bicycle was broken (or as I like to say, operationally challenged since this is the optimism only section) this week, I got to do a lot more hitchhiking on campus this week (which makes me sound really awesome and On the Road-ish, but is actually a norm). The weekend consisted mostly of playing football(soccer) and frisbee at ungodly early hours of the morning to avoid the heat. We've officially hit the 100 degree range this week, and I can no longer get the shower to emit cold water. I never thought I'd have that problem.
With any luck, the maybe-test, that glorious hypothetical proof that I am actually doing something remotely academic and will receive a bountiful reward (course credit) for my arduous quest to procure syllabus and books, will be occurring today. It did not happen last week like I had hoped, but I'm sure the professor will actually show up for class today.
***** Update! ***** The maybe-test occurred yesterday (I started writing this on Monday morning but got distracted). Still no sign of my professor, but he did send a lovely substitute who lectured about something (unrelated to human rights). My doodling skills have been improving immensely!
Other mini adventures: I finally got to see the Birla Temple this week, which is this beautiful giant white temple in the middle of Hyderabad with ornate shrines to most of the major religions of India. I have successfully learned to ride my bike with no handle bars, another marketable skill from India that I will surely write on my resume for the internships that I really do not want, but should be applying for because if I don't get an internship this summer there is no possible way I will know what to do with my life, let alone get a job, my education will crumble to pieces, I will have to sell my hair (which I am told will soon fall out anyway due to the malaria pills) to pay off my student loans, and I will have to resort to keeping the twelve cats that I will be living with (since no suitable husband will accept me without a junior year internship) in my refrigerator box home.
I also got to see a Kuchipudi fusion dance performance in honor of Women's month. An Indian woman started with a short Kuchipudi piece, which is the traditional dance of Andhra Pradesh, and then a random German woman in the audience started talking to her, and she looked sort of taken aback. I assumed that this woman was actually a stranger interrupting the performance because something like that would actually be totally normal here [more and more, I am realizing that funniness is almost completely contextual. People do the most bizarre, hilarious things here -- like grown men joyously singing Barbie Girl on their bicycles and asking me for an autograph and chanting PEENAPELL!! (pineapple. And yeah, the double parentheses just happened) in a chipmunk voice continuously for an hour straight on a moving train at 6AM -- but they're social norms. Sometimes I worry that when I come home, my appreciation for the ridiculous will have dulled... or I will just have more fodder to freak people out with my weird behavior. One of those two.] Anyway, it turns out the German woman was part of the show and they were doing one of those weird postmodern, breaking down of the 4th wall in theater things. So she got up and did some really awesome, but very odd modern dance involving a machine which looked a bit like a jet pack strapped to her back which made various cricket, water, and other new-agey earth noises whenever she moved. And now everyone in the audience thinks that your typical Western dance. It's just like what I used to do in England: do something weird and insist that its an American tradition.
Other than that, I've just been spending a lot of time trying to talk to people on campus and in Hyderabad. I've had limited opportunity since I've been away most weekends (and CIEE doesn't want me to make friends so they keep me in a foreigners only fortress a mile from everyone else on campus. Shouldn't complain though. We get air conditioning). It's been a really exciting week in that respect. Everyone I've met has been really awesome/way more interesting than I will ever be. But conversations don't make for very exciting adventure stories so I'll leave it with that for now.
We're headed to Mysore this weekend for the CIEE planned field trip, so I'm preparing for more middle school fun. I hope we get to wear our matching T-shirts again.
Instead of going on a long trip this week I've been having a lot of miniadventures (most involving getting lost, actually involving India getting lost and changing the relativity of my geographic position through no fault of my own). I got to jumped on several rapidly accelerating buses this week, which is pretty much the equivalent of eating an apple pie at a baseball game in America. I'm basically assimilated. And I drove a motorcycle (in an empty parking lot for 8 seconds. It counts). Because my bicycle was broken (or as I like to say, operationally challenged since this is the optimism only section) this week, I got to do a lot more hitchhiking on campus this week (which makes me sound really awesome and On the Road-ish, but is actually a norm). The weekend consisted mostly of playing football(soccer) and frisbee at ungodly early hours of the morning to avoid the heat. We've officially hit the 100 degree range this week, and I can no longer get the shower to emit cold water. I never thought I'd have that problem.
With any luck, the maybe-test, that glorious hypothetical proof that I am actually doing something remotely academic and will receive a bountiful reward (course credit) for my arduous quest to procure syllabus and books, will be occurring today. It did not happen last week like I had hoped, but I'm sure the professor will actually show up for class today.
***** Update! ***** The maybe-test occurred yesterday (I started writing this on Monday morning but got distracted). Still no sign of my professor, but he did send a lovely substitute who lectured about something (unrelated to human rights). My doodling skills have been improving immensely!
Other mini adventures: I finally got to see the Birla Temple this week, which is this beautiful giant white temple in the middle of Hyderabad with ornate shrines to most of the major religions of India. I have successfully learned to ride my bike with no handle bars, another marketable skill from India that I will surely write on my resume for the internships that I really do not want, but should be applying for because if I don't get an internship this summer there is no possible way I will know what to do with my life, let alone get a job, my education will crumble to pieces, I will have to sell my hair (which I am told will soon fall out anyway due to the malaria pills) to pay off my student loans, and I will have to resort to keeping the twelve cats that I will be living with (since no suitable husband will accept me without a junior year internship) in my refrigerator box home.
I also got to see a Kuchipudi fusion dance performance in honor of Women's month. An Indian woman started with a short Kuchipudi piece, which is the traditional dance of Andhra Pradesh, and then a random German woman in the audience started talking to her, and she looked sort of taken aback. I assumed that this woman was actually a stranger interrupting the performance because something like that would actually be totally normal here [more and more, I am realizing that funniness is almost completely contextual. People do the most bizarre, hilarious things here -- like grown men joyously singing Barbie Girl on their bicycles and asking me for an autograph and chanting PEENAPELL!! (pineapple. And yeah, the double parentheses just happened) in a chipmunk voice continuously for an hour straight on a moving train at 6AM -- but they're social norms. Sometimes I worry that when I come home, my appreciation for the ridiculous will have dulled... or I will just have more fodder to freak people out with my weird behavior. One of those two.] Anyway, it turns out the German woman was part of the show and they were doing one of those weird postmodern, breaking down of the 4th wall in theater things. So she got up and did some really awesome, but very odd modern dance involving a machine which looked a bit like a jet pack strapped to her back which made various cricket, water, and other new-agey earth noises whenever she moved. And now everyone in the audience thinks that your typical Western dance. It's just like what I used to do in England: do something weird and insist that its an American tradition.
Other than that, I've just been spending a lot of time trying to talk to people on campus and in Hyderabad. I've had limited opportunity since I've been away most weekends (and CIEE doesn't want me to make friends so they keep me in a foreigners only fortress a mile from everyone else on campus. Shouldn't complain though. We get air conditioning). It's been a really exciting week in that respect. Everyone I've met has been really awesome/way more interesting than I will ever be. But conversations don't make for very exciting adventure stories so I'll leave it with that for now.
We're headed to Mysore this weekend for the CIEE planned field trip, so I'm preparing for more middle school fun. I hope we get to wear our matching T-shirts again.
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