New Blog

Hello everyone!

Welcome to my new blog! I will be posting in this once in a while during my stay in India so you all can have a little taste of what it's like to be there. Other than that, I may post a few Facebook statuses and Skype infrequently and whatnot, but the idea is to sever most of my contact with my home country so I can make the most of this exchange.

I am going to the town of Bharuch, in the state of Gujarat, via Rotary Youth Exchange (RYE). I leave in a week!! :) I'm going to stay there for about 10 or 11 months. I will be learning the language of Gujarati, and will be staying with a family of the Jain religion. I will be a vegetarian starting as soon as I set foot in O'Hare--no meat or eggs, but I will be eating dairy. The school I'm going to is called Queen of Angels Convent High School.

The photo at the bottom left is the design I made for the pins I'm bringing on my exchange. Those are for trading with other exchange students and putting them on each other's blazers. I can also give them to Rotarians and give them as gifts and whatnot. The orange, white, and green stripes with the blue circle in the middle are the flag of India; in the orange stripe, of course, is the US flag, and the other flags are Brazil (top right) and Sweden (middle left), because I'm half Brazilian and half Swedish (AKA Swezilian :D). Over the US flag is a music note because I love music, and at the bottom is the Chicago skyline. The back of each pin says "Rotary Youth Exchange rocks!"

My signature in this blog is "Eric" spelled in the Gujarati script. The Gujarati script is an abiguda, which is very different from the alphabet structure we use in the US. It's structured in exactly the same way as the Devanagari script, which is used for Hindi and other languages.

So now I've pretty much filled you in!

Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.