Monday, August 22, 2011

Episode III

Kem chho!!!

I had been thinking about whether I should just stick to one blog post being taken from my journal or if I should continue doing this, and after I realized how much stuff I've been writing in it that I don't want to forget, I decided to do it again for at least this one.

                                                                                                                                        27/7
Mruga Auntie was sick this morning and went to the hospital for a little while (Remember, the hospital is also the doctor’s office.) but is feeling better now.

Story! On that first day here, as I was being driven to their house, I asked Grishma if they drink the tap water, and she said no, as if that was a ridiculous idea, so I assumed their water, other than what they’ve purified, was in fact contaminated, as I had heard. But today I learned that the water is not contaminated, and that it’s actually good enough that you could drink it. They just further purify their drinking water. They have a filter for the rest of the water, too. So I’ll be brushing my teeth with non-parasite-infested water, as well as showering in it and washing my face in it.

Today I taught Grishma how to play Egyptian War. Yesterday I taught it to Manthan, and both of them liked it a lot, so we ended up playing a really long game (and not finishing it. That game is really hard to finish.). Manthan has a natural knack for it, and Grishma’s pretty good too. They’re quick learners. Manthan likes to cheat, though, so Grishma and I sort of tamed up against him to try to enforce the rules better.

I’m used to saying simple words and phrases in Gujarati without thinking about it, like the translations of “yes,” “no,” “It’s yours” (for playing Egyptian War), “It’s mine,” “I know,” “I don’t know,” “What’s this,” “I like it,” “what should I do,” “goodbye” (which can be just “bye” or it can be “avjo”), “It’s fine,” “What’s that,” “What’s your name,” “My name is Eric,” “Hello,” “How are you,” and probably some other phrases I’m forgetting, plus a bunch of vocab words I can use to form sentences. I’ve also developed the habit of using the Indian head bob thing sometimes, which I now understand how to use and interpret, and which doesn’t look weird to me anymore!

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Saw a snake in a tree today. The servants are trying to get rid of it. The Gujarati word for snake is saap.
If you’ve ever heard of air conditioning not existing in India, you’re wrong. It does exist. I can control the temperature in my room with a remote control. It’s kind of sweet. I hadn’t been using it until now because the ceiling fan made it somewhat cooler, to the point of being comfortable. But today’s been a little hotter, so I turned on the AC and the cold felt really good!!! I’m starting to miss some things about home, like the cold, my friends, my family, good English, food that isn’t weird with my digestion, and of course toilet paper. But more so, I’m having a good time.

I haven’t heard back from Rajiv. So much for high hopes.

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Forgot to ask Rajiv about the Gujarati/Hindi/music classes. I saw him today because I went to a rotary meeting today and introduced myself to my host club, and he drove me.

I’ve been wanting to write something here about how I haven’t gotten sick yet, but I didn’t want to jinx it. However, I had decided to go ahead and write this today, and sure enough it was today that I started experiencing problems. It looks like I’m not sick, though. I’m just having digestion problems, which everyone does when they first come to India. Grishma said 99% of the exchange students experience it on the first day, so I must be awesome because it took me 5 days, not including what I had on my flight and whatnot. So I guess maybe you could say 7 days if you count all the vegetarian food. They thought it was really funny when I told them I have a “hardy stomach” and demonstrated by thumping my hand over my gut.

Oh yeah, I never mentioned that they want me to sing them a song at some point. Apparently people do random singing performances upon request around here. That’ll be interesting. It’s going to be an old Indian song that Uncle and Auntie will appreciate. I have yet to confirm how common quarter tones are in Indian music, but I know they exist, and I don’t know if I’m too westernized to accustom myself to them.
I’m really good at saying “thodu thodu” now!

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                                                                                                                                        28/7
Today I bought Indian clothes for the first time! They styles are similar to those in the US, but the difference is that here I can afford really nice clothes. I just bought a few T shirts because they exhibited a style I liked and also portrayed the style of Indian clothes around here, but I also bought a kurta, which Manthan and Grishma helped me pick out! That was pretty cool. They T-shirts are actually really high quality and have really cool designs on them, and they cost me $5 each. Jackpot. The general rule I’ve developed is to multiply the Indian price by 5, and that’s what it costs in the US. Another conversion I have to know is the exchange rate, which is about 41 Rs. per dollar. So if I need to know whether I can afford something, I just divide by 40, but if I want to know how much an impact on people’s spending an item would have, I then multiply by 5, so in that situation I’m just dividing by 8. Fun stuff. And of course I also have to convert between metric and English units.

I also went to the gym today. Hadn’t done that in a while. It felt good. But it’s not nearly as good as Lifetime. Not that it needs to be. Lifetime’s a little ridiculous.

I also got a cell phone, which will activate in a few days.

School starts soon! Which means I’ll get to meet some new people!

Today I’m supposedly going to go set up my classes that will be outside of school. That’ll be a relief.

Jayesh Uncle keeps encouraging me to speak Gujarati, and oftentimes it’s difficult because he tells me this when what I need to say is something of which only a small part am I able to say in Gujarati. Gujarati is definitely a hybrid language with English and also some Hindi—they call it GujHing, or GujEng if it’s just with English—but it’s definitely more Gujarati than anything else, so it sounds weird to say something with like one word in Gujarati and the rest in English, but they understand obviously. Though they do like to make fun of it.

Today I increased my stack of flash cards for words I want to know but have not yet been taught by about 50%, doubled my stack of cards I’ve been taught but have not yet memorized, and increased my stack of memorized cards by about 10%. Last night I increased it by 50%. The memorized cards stack is two inches thick, and the other two are each about half an inch.

Digestion is officially back to normal!

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Determined that I will be taking a one-hour-a-day, four-days-a week sitar class. Later I might add harmonium and or singing to that.

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Ate at a dhaba for dinner. I didn’t eat very much. I ate a lot for lunch for two reasons, one being that I don’t have a very good idea of how much Indian food is a lot since everything fills you up to a different degree, and the other being that halfway through lunch I thought about how I’m not getting as much protein here as I normally get, so I served myself some extra beans and dal after I had already eaten a fair amount of food. So I wasn’t hungry for dinner. But I’m also realizing that, though I love Indian food, the taste is really intense, whether it’s sweetness, spiciness, or any other flavor, and I can’t really handle having it every day for every meal. It’s become somewhat of a chore. I’m guessing I’ll get used to it, though.

Yesterday I discovered a detail regarding Gujarati pronunciation that I had previously been missing, now I’m that much better with the accent.

This letter means “shwa”: શ્વ. It’s not very common, but yesterday I ran into it and didn’t know what it was, so now that I’ve written it down I should remember it.

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                                                                                                                                        30/7
Added another inch to my stack of memorized words & phrases. I still don’t know Gujarati (my Facebook profile is lying). (AKA I’m lying.)

I just ate a vitamin pill, but I think the food here is actually nutritious enough, if not more nutritious than what I eat back home. (Although they do eat white bread much more than whole grain here. But seeing as it’s all vegetarian food that I’m eating, there’s no danger of not having enough fiber.)

Oh yeah, Manthan & Grishma’s grandfather is 90 years old & is in amazing health for his age. He reads all the time, still has almost perfect eyesight, and if he wanted could walk everywhere he needs to go rather than go by vehicle. He’s also very good at English. I met him and his wife yesterday.

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                                                                                                                                          1/8
Went to school, made friends, and ate this chocolate (There is a wrapper from a Cadbury brand chocolate stapled here). And went to the gym. I was going to hang out but I’m a bit sick so I told them how about tomorrow.

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                                                                                                                                          2/8
Met Leo on Skype today. Leo is a kid from France who was in India for RYE last year. He stayed at this house for 15 days, but other than that he only had one host family the whole year. He had a good experience and misses India a lot.

India has a holiday called Sister’s Day, when we acknowledge what our sisters have done for us. That will be this Friday, in 3 days. There will be a dance performance that I’m being included in and that I’m helping to choreograph. It’s to a hip hop song called “Aloo Chaat.” We just started working on the dance today. I think it’ll be fun.

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                                                                                                                                          3/8
People are being weird about the dance because the girls say they “aren’t comfortable with the moves.” They say the song is too fast. So we’re trying to decide between that song and a Spanish song called “Señorita” which is not as entertaining in my opinion. We’re also running low on time. I’m okay with doing “Señorita” as long as we can find the right moves to go with it, which might be difficult because we don’t want it to be romantic since that wouldn’t fit the idea of sister’s Day, and the song is a little romantic.

Playing basketball at school is fun.

Oh yeah, funny story! Remember how I talked about toilet paper? Well in the US people in Rotary who knew about India or who had done an exchange year to India had always talked about how there’s no toilet paper, but didn’t mention any substitutes. A few people actually told me they used their hand. And then at the Grand Rapids Conference we were shown a piece of the movie Outsourced, in which Indians explain to an American why they only eat food with their right hand—because the left hand is considered “unclean.” Upon asking why this is, one of the Indian people demonstrates a motion involving repeatedly rubbing his backside with his left hand, quite enthusiastically. So I was convinced this was what I would have to do. It took me ten days to discover a knob in my host family’s bathroom that turns on a spout of water in the toilet that does this job, and even after several people read my blog in India, no one apparently noticed the error in what I wrote earlier, and therefore no one corrected me and told me about the knob. But still, some of the bathrooms in India are quite uncomfortable. I won’t give details. Mine is good though. The ones at school are pretty bad.

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                                                                                                                                        10/8
I was confusing Sister’s Day with a holiday called Rakhshabandhan. On Rakhshabandhan, which is this Saturday, the 13th, sisters tie what are called “rakhis" to their brothers’ hands, and this is a symbol of protection from danger (spiritual protection—but it actually also symbolizes appreciation for the “brother” having protected the sister thus far, and is a request to continue this protection). They also tie rakhis to other boys of very roughly their age (Actually, later Grishma tied one to her uncle, so I guess they can be pretty much any age as long as the relationship is somewhat like that of a brother and sister)—I’ve already gotten two early ones. In return, I am supposed to give a small gift to them, such as a chocolate, but I was not prepared for this so early, so next time I see them I will do this.

Sister’s Day is not an Indian holiday specifically; it is just a day that my school—being Catholic—has in order to recognize the Sisters (capitalized) of the school—i.e. the nuns.

India has many holidays and festivals, and as if there weren’t already enough, a few years ago they (I’m sure if it was Gujarat, India, or what) decided to include international holidays as well. So they will be celebrating Christmas, etc.

By the way, sorry for jumping back and forth between ideas. I’m trying to write quickly because I need to get to sleep, and I’m also tired because it’s late. That said, the Sister’s Day celebration was a lot of fun. There were 13 performances, of which ours was the last. We ended up using a “fusion” of “Aloo Chaat” and “Señorita”—“Aloo Chaat” making up the first part and “Señorita” being a kind of happy-ending-type-thing. I have a video. During “Aloo Chaat,” they had me do a gymnastics stunt for one part, and as if I wasn’t famous already for being the foreigner, everyone is now coming up to me and asking my name whether in Hindi, Gujarati, or English, all of which I can respond to :D. In fact, many of the smaller kids (the school ranges from kindergarten to 12th standard, and might also contain a preschool) were asking me for my autograph. I have a video of that too. Manthan and Grishma had to me pull me away… And then later that day people at home were making fun, saying that now that I’m a celebrity I need to make sure I don’t forget them.

Sara, from Florida, and Dafnne, from Brazil, the only other exchange students in Bharuch, are now here, and will be in my class. Sara started school on Monday (today is Wednesday, in case you haven’t done the math yet), and Dafnne started today. I wasn’t in school today or yesterday because yesterday my family took me to Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat, and today they decided to take me to a store called Big Bazaar for a sale they were having.

So recently what I’ve been up to is taking my yoga classes, learning Gujarati, sitting in whenever we have company over (which is frequently), and helping Grishma hand-make 250 pins that she’s going to take to Italy I’m also trying to gather up ingredients for some recipes I like to from home, which Jayesh Uncle wants us to eat in the next few days. There are two recipes: one is twice-baked potatoes, and the other is called “paezinhos de cinco minutos,” which is something my Brazilian grandmother invented, and which do not actually take only five minutes to make. They are also known as “Vovó bread”—“Vovó” being the Portuguese word for grandmother. The Vovó bread won’t be an issue, but we’re having a really hard time finding both onion chives and sour cream for the twice-baked potatoes, the two most important ingredients aside from the potatoes, I’d say. Well, cheese is pretty important too, and I guess that’s all the ingredients right there. So basically it’s a very important food.

I lied about digestion problems being gone. They had only taken a short leave. But slowly they are subsiding… I’ve also had a cold for about a week now. After a long time yoga is supposed to greatly reduce the number of illnesses you get, so I’m crossing my fingers there… some people just don’t get sick much anyway, so I guess I just suck.

Hindi/gujarati/music classes still haven’t started yet. After discussion, it has been decided that I will start off not taking Gujarati classes in case I don’t have time for them and since Hindi is a more useful language, and also since I’ll be able to learn Gujarati through my host family, and we were waiting for Sara and Dafnne to arrive before starting the Hindi lessons so we could all take them together, but I don’t know what’s going on with the music classes, so I will investigate this.

People usually aren’t free to hang out because exams are coming up and they have what’s called “tution,” which is at least 3 hours a day of further studies after school. It’s technically optional, and since I don’t have to take exams and there are many other things I’m interested in doing, everyone has recommended I don’t take part in it. But pretty much everyone else goes to tution. Actual school is not taken very seriously, and there is never any homework, so it’s very easy. We just talk and don’t do much, other than maybe fiv math problems as the maximum amount of work in a class. But it seems like tution is very demanding.

Good stuff is super cheap here.

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                                                                                                                                        11/8
Good news: Hindi and Gujarati classes will be combined into one, beginning today at 6 PM! Bad news: my yoga class is at 6 PM, so I can no longer go to this class. We are looking for a new yoga class for me.

They yoga thing is something I’m really not used to, but I like the idea of the effect it’s supposed to have on me, and it was kind of invented in India, so if there’s any place to do it, it’s here.

I’m not extremely busy, but I’m busy enough not to miss home that much! :P

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                                                                                                                                        12/8
We decided to focus on Hindi for now in our class. Yesterday all we did was go over the Hindi alphabet, which I already know, so it was kind of boring. Sarah’s host brother, who is five, has a tutor come every day to teach him Hindi, and from that Sarah also learns Hindi, so she’s learning quickly too. Dafnne is obviously having trouble a little more because she also has to learn English. Tomorrow she wants me to give her an English lesson. Tomorrow she and I are also going to the store to buy ingredients for brigadeiros, a Brazilian dessert that’s REALLY GOOD!!!!! :D today I’m going to look up the procedure for making twice-baked potatoes.

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JK I’m not. We decided we’ll make them after I get back from Bombay. Grishma leaves at 1:00 AM this Wednesday, and she’s going from Bombay Airport, so we decided that we’d stay a few days in Bombay. We’ll leave home at 8:00 AM Monday morning, the 15th (which happens to be India’s Independence Day), and get back around midday Thursday. And I’m too lazy to look up how to make twice-baked potatoes this early on.

My Hindi lesson was better today. First our teacher made us write more words in the Hindi script (which is called Devanagari), and Dafnne began to understand how it works. Tomorrow when I help her with English I’ll also help her with that. After we wrote those words, our teacher (“Nita Miss”—in India, instead of saying “Miss Nita” they say “Nita Miss”) taught us some vocab words, which began a new stack of flash cards for me. I wish she had given us more, though, because I’ve already memorized them, and I have this weekend plus my Bombay trip before my next class, which makes 6 days. I brought a book to teach me Hindi, which Nivetha gave to me. Thanks Nivetha! I don’t remember if we had agreed for me to give that back to you haha… If that was the case then oops… sorry… but thanks…

Dafnne has a weird southern accent in Portuguese. According to her, the southern pronunciation is the correct one. All I know is it’s weird in my book.

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                                                                                                                                        13/8
Rakhshabandhan was nice. I woke up (slept late), found out that I had to dress up in order to go to their temple and so hurried to eat breakfast & get dressed up nice, had Grishma tie a rakhi to me plus one more from someone who wasn’t able to come and had Grishma do it for her, went to the temple with Grishma and Manthan, did the procedure there (which involved tying a rakhi to the holding area of a statue of Lord Mahavir and then walking thrice around the temple), spent some time at Jainil/Manan’s house, downloaded Audacity there and edited a song for Grishma, had a lunch of only food approved by Grishma since she’s leaving soon (Last night it was decided that she would choose, to which Manthan replied “We can’t stay hungry,” because she doesn’t eat much), took a nap (People take naps oftentimes after lunch here because we’re eating big lunches which activates the parasympathetic nervous system which makes you sleepy), uploaded pics to FB, went to Dafnne’s house to give an English lesson, met her host brother Supas who did RYE to Miami and likes American pop&rap&techno&rock&metal music (like me!) and also speaks English really well with an American accent (for once), ate out at a Chinese restaurant with that family (the mother is the RYE inbound coordinator for our district, and today I learned that any time we eat with a Rotarian the tradition is that they pay for it!), then ate ice cream with them, and then came home and wrote the longest sentence I’ve ever written! Tomorrow I will have a sitar lesson at 4:00, and I will also give my host family the gifts I’ve brought for them. Oh yeah, I can’t forget to pack for Bombay.

My window blinds have mold on them because of the moisture. That sucks. But what doesn’t suck is that I can sleep late tomorrow, so tonight I’ll learn some Hindi or just read.

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                                                                                                                                        14/8
Today was another great day. Woke up late and fixed myself a nice Indian breakfast, for starters. Auntie often always makes me chocolate milk twice a day, once for breakfast and once in the afternoon. Then we went to Jainil & Manan’s house for lunch, which this time actually turned out kind of boring for me because they spoke a lot of Gujarati with each other. Their mother (I don’t remember her name) placed a bindi on Grishma and gave her a coconut with a bindi on it as well as some money as a way of blessing her trip to Italy. Whenever money is given as a gift, you’re not supposed to spend it but instead invest it. Forgot to mention that before this visit, I did a bunch of email schtuph and tried to upload 2 vids on FB but right before they finished uploading I lost internet signal on the laptop. So yeah, morning and midday were kind of boring, but then I went to my sitar class and discovered that sitar is quite possible for me to play. It will just take time for me to become flexible enough to sit in the right position for more than about fifteen minutes. I learned the names of notes as they are taught in India ( रे नी —sa, re, ga, ma, pa, dha, ni, sa—being an A major scale) and the names of different parts of a sitar. Then I gave my host family the gifts I brought for them, including the photo book of the Chicago Botanic Garden that Mom suggested I give to Mruga Auntie, which she did like, and I also did not forget to pass on Mom’s invitation for her to come to Chicago and see the Botanic Garden! Then we had a dinner of Grishma-approved food, and then I packed for Mumbai. And now I’m going to bed!

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                                                                                                                                        16/8
It’s 1:20 AM. We’ve been traveling for quite some time, but now we’re in Mumbai! We’re staying at Pradeep Uncle’s home, which is in an apartment complex. As usual, they asked me whether I wanted this and that, and every time I said No, thank you, they asked me if I wanted something else, until I finally gave in on tea. I wasn’t hungry because I had just recently eaten at one of the several houses we stopped at along the way to say Hi. Throughout dinner, I sat cross-legged. I’m proud of this. It hurt to stand up, though.

So yeah, an hour and a half ago was Independence Day! This morning we were watching the news, which showed a huge parade of orange, white, and green. We picked up little plastic Indian flags on the street. Mine is in the car.

I was taking pictures along the way (Actually, at first I forgot to, and then even after stopping for ice cream I forgot again, and I received a lot of criticism for not taking enough pictures, so we had to stop again for me to get out my camera from the back of the car.), but my camera soon ran out of batteries, so I took Manthan’s camera, which then also ran out of batteries. However, I did manage to take maybe twenty or so pictures, and much of what I missed I will have a second opportunity to capture on the way back.

Well, I’m sharing a room with Jayesh Uncle and Manthan, and they are ready to go to sleep, which means I have to turn off the light. Good night…

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                                                                                                                                        17/8
Goodbye, Grishma! She has safely arrived in Venice and has been taken to her home in Cordovada. She enjoyed her first meal. I guess you can read about it for yourself at exchangeyeartoitaly.blogspot.com (She stole my blog name!).

Back to happenings… today I went on a tour of Mumbai. It was cool. It’s pretty modernized. A fair amount of it was just a more polluted version of stuff you could find in Chicago, but there were more interesting things like the Old Taj Hotel, the New Taj Hotel, and the Gateway to India. I also saw a bunch of battleships and an aircraft carrier, which are illegal to take pictures of due to terrorism. Got to go to bed.
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                                                                                                                                        18/8
Jayesh Uncle just now decided to explain to me that Indian people are often very commanding in their English—he says it’s because it’s a developing country—and that I should not think it rude when they do this. I often had, in fact, thought people were annoyed with me because of this. So now I know…

Had a nice long trip back home, and took some good pictures. When I got home, it was too late to make it to my sitar class, but I did manage to make it to my Hindi class, where I caught up on some of the stuff I missed and then learned a little about verb tenses. Sarah and Dafnne tried to tell me some story about how they had a yoga class together at Dafnne’s house, and when the teacher did something they thought was funny they laughed at her, and then the next time she didn’t come because she didn’t like them because of that. But it took them fifteen minutes to tell the story because they kept cracking up laughing whenever they tried to. I thought it was kind of sad because I know of the yoga technique they were talking about, and I had in fact both observed and performed it each of the three days that I had my yoga class, and never once did laughing cross my mind. But I don’t know, maybe this teacher did it in a particularly funny way. Still, that’s pretty disrespectful.

Apparently nothing much has happened in school since I last went, which is nice. Problem is, there’s another dance performance they want me in for the Teacher’s Day celebration. I don’t remember when that is. But yeah, they had to start working on that without me, and I don’t know if I’m even going to be in it.

After Hindi class today, Sarah got a ride home, and Dafnne and I walked home together and then went on a walk for exercise. We’re both feeling the effects of Indian hospitality and eating habits. I’ve already gained 3 kgs. Tomorrow Manthan and I are going to the gym, and I think Dafnne will also be coming along.

Tomorrow I also have to prepare a 2 minute presentation about my home country, which I only found out about today, and which is due in 2 days for my first Rotary orientation. Sarah and I will be working on ours together since we’re from the same country, and since Dafnne already finished hers. I saw it. It was good.

I have a pretty serious farmer’s tan right now because of yesterday’s boat trip on the tour.

Oh yeah also there will be a talent show at the orientation. If they have a keyboard or a piano I’ll play that. Otherwise, I’ll just sing the US national anthem I guess. Don’t screw up…

Also, on the way to Mumbai, one of the people whose house we stopped at gave me another journal to write in. It’s much smaller than this one and has a picture of some kind of religious person—I think Jain—in a yoga-type sitting position, as well as some Sanskrit words on the inside front cover, and some other Devanagari on the outer cover whose language I haven’t been told. Maybe it’s also Sanskrit. Talking about Sanskrit gives me goose bumps because it’s a super-fricken-old language that evolved into all the languages of India other than those that came from other countries, and really old religious stuff in many religions is written in Sanskrit. Indian patriotic songs are often written in Sanskrit or partly in Sanskrit. Sanskrit is also supposedly really hard to learn. It is also for some reason supposed to be ideal for a computer language, because it’s “based on objects,” as Grishma told me after researching it for a presentation she’s giving in Italy. She and I both don’t know what “based on objects” means. Anyway, I decided that I’d save that journal for toward the end of my stay here, when I’m good at Gujarati, so I can use it as a Gujarati journal.

No school tomorrow for Zoroastrian New Year. No school Monday either because it’s Lord Krishna’s birthday, which has a name that I forgot. 4 day weekend! Wooo!
And now I'm sitting in our living room watching TV that I still don't understand, writing this blog post. Tonight we're going to make Vovó bread with dinner. I still need to post all my new pictures and videos on Facebook, and I also need to see how to get all that stuff on this blog. Sorry for working slow on that. Internet is slow here, plus I don't always have time to go on the internet. But it'll happen.

Well, I'm going to sign off again. Keep reading, and I'll see you in about ten months!!