Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey!

One of the most amazing things about Kolkata is its food. So I thought I'd do a summary of the various things I consume in a typical day, and start taking bets about how much weight I'm going to gain. :)
Breakfast (at the Mission): cornflakes with hot milk, strong tea with lots of milk and sugar, a banana, toast, two eggs prepared to order (I like fried, where they use so much oil that the eggs attain a consistency that I've never seen from eggs before), marmalade and butter (for the toast).
At Kathak class: tea (really sweet and milky: you have to taste this stuff to believe it! It comes in tiny little glass cups, so we have lots of them), sometimes biscuits, mishti doi (sweet yogurt flavored with jaghuri, or palm sugar), lassis, green coconut milk, samosas, sandesh (the most amazing sweets in the world: once again, you have to taste them to believe them! Little jaghuri-flavored grainy patties of heaven...) or whatever else the teachers feel like getting for us. They're so nice with the food!
Lunch: Usually a sandwich from Barista (the Starbucks of India), or whatever else I can scrounge up. I made some trail mix from peanuts, raisins, and chocolate: amazing!
Dinner: Either out at a restaurant if the performance we've gone to (there's one just about every night) runs late (dinner at the Mission is 8-9:30), or at the Mission, in which case it's vegetables, soup, and a choice of veg, chicken, or fish with cooked vegetables, and some sort of dessert (paish, which is runny, amazing rice pudding, or fruit salad with dates, apples, etc., or mishti doi, or cake with custard...)

Mmmmmm, so good......

Languages I'm learning

Ami Bangla bali na!
-Bengali for "I don't speak Bengali"

Ta tunga taka tunga
Diga a ta
Ta tunga taka
Diga diga diga diga diga diga thei
Dat dat thei dat dat thei dat dat thei
-Kathak for "so pretty!"

* *
-Mime for... well, use your imagination. :)

Come take a walk with me!

Okay, so I thought that in the interest of giving some sense of what life is actually like here, I'll do descriptions of little things. I'll start with a walk down Rashbehari Avenue, or at least a small part of it. This is the way I walk to dance and mime class, if I don't take the bus. Okay, so here we are. On the right is a row of shops, selling some sort of clothing: colorful sarees, salvar kameezes, etc., or electronics, or sweets (they're laid out in pyramids in a glass case), or food (idlys, rolls, momos (dumplings), reads a sign out front). The ground is made of red bricks, and you have to watch your footing on the uneven, dusty ground. On the left, near the street, are a variety of things: a cha (tea) stand, with hot tea steaming in a metal pot, a man shining shoes, a barber shaving someone, a stand with bangles, earrings, hair clips, and other pretty things laid out, a man or woman sitting on the ground with piles of oranges, bunches of bananas, shiny white pear-like things, what look like bruised cherry tomatoes, and other familiar and un-familiar fruits and vegetables, a stand where two men are stirring massive (ie 3 feet across) metal bins of lentils or cauliflower, to be eaten with the hands from a plate made of leaves, and of course there will be a stray dog or two sleeping in the sun, a homeless person completely covered with a blanket, and several half-naked, dirty children running around, and on the corner someone with a pile of green coconuts who will, when asked, hack off the top and give one to you with a straw, to drink the milk. The smells are a mixture of the food, the tea, human excrement, and dirt, Bengali and traffic sounds (lots of horns!) fill the air, and everywhere is a litter composed of the small clay cups in which the tea is served, leaves, newspaper, food wrappers, and just plain dirt. The sky is a dusty grey, polluted as it is, and winter sun shines wanly through the trees that line the street.
And that's just a 20-foot stretch of one street. Life here is crazy!

And random thought, for most of you I am writing from the future... creepy!

PS, as always

I found an internet cafe where AIM works, and I'll try to get there at a reasonable time for you guys sometime, maybe tomorrow? Reasonable being like 12 or 1 in the morning, of course. Yay!
Also randomly, I heard this bird today that sounded exactly like a dog's sqeak toy. Bizarre, eh?

Dirty

I am absolutely filthy. And filthy-minded as well, yes, you naughty people, but in more physical terms I actually have dirt all over me. I had the first mime class today, which turned out to be a group of males ranging in age from (approximately) 5 to 55 and me on a rough wooden stage in a theater. We learned four different ways to walk without moving and did various exercises, yoga-type stuff, some gymnastic-type things, etc. Then straight from there I went to kathak, where I finally met the senior teacher, who is a sweet older woman who is mesmerizing to watch even though she didn't stand up the entire time I was there (my teacher until now has been her disciple, a hearty young woman who dances with lots of flair). And of course I got very lost finding both and was quite late, but at least I got there eventually. So back to dirt. I've also been feeling dirty realizing what men here actually think of white women. During a fiasco trying to get to a club to hear jazz music (we were taken to the other end of the city because the name of the club is the same as the name of another part of town, and the driver wouldn't believe us when we said we knew where it was), Ramona, a Romanian film studies student who lives down the hall from me, told about how when she catches guys mentally undressing her she'll just yell at them in Bengali, "What are you looking at?" And men do do that a lot, I've found. From the movies, probably, they think that white women are prostitutes. Even in my mime class, the teachers and other students were looking at me funny, the little boys differently from the men. It doesn't bother me much yet, and I"m hoping it won't get worse. Wearing salwar kameeze (traditional Indian clothes) seems to help.
I wonder what those men would think if they saw Gobi Awakened, hee hee...

I keep forgetting things...

Okay, so AIM seems to be finicky here, so is anyone else game to try g-mail chatting? I don't actually know how it works yet, but let me know if you want to.

Time warp

Time works differently here. It's so weird. For instance, today's schedule: breakfast somewhere between 7:30 and 9, Kathak class (was going to be at 8:30, then changed to 10:00, then changed to 11:30 because of some reason that I will never and don't need to know), then yoga from 2-3, paying the first installment of my rent, coming to this internet cafe to update etc., Bengali class from 6:30-8, dinner somewhere before 9:30. And in there I have to practice yoga and Kathak. Now to a Western eye that will look like a lot of free time, right? No!!! Somewhere between public transportation and walking, taking a nap (very necessary), waiting for things (constant!!!), chatting, exchanging phone numbers, etc., all this free time slips down the drain. But I like it, it gives the feeling that I'm always doing something worthwhile and important, so there's no time to feel sad or anything.
Oh, have you noticed that my English is changing? It's weird, but the little voice in my head (you know, the one that reads along as you type) has a slight Bengali accent all of a sudden. I suppose it's natural, and you can get used to it here before you have to hear me when I come back, stricken with bad grammar and foreign inflections, heh heh. Oh well.
Let's see, strange/interesting/new things for today:
-At last night's Kathak concert I discovered that some things are truly universal: one of these is that when a dance school caters to rich families, the result will be a lavishly costumed performance featuring adorable tykes waving at their parents (and not doing much else) and questionably trained older students. Well, I suppose that's too harsh, there was some nice dancing, but I got the sense that this school trained mostly for these shows and less for any actual technique. (For those in the know (ie Becky), think Donna's class vs. Bette's class).
-When you buy clothing here (women's, at least), it comes unfinished, so you take it to a tailor, where they measure you and you can watch them as they put sleeves on the kameeze (tunic) and alter it to fit you. I got this done for a couple of things which now don't fit (my massive biceps seem to be too much for them, ha ha), so I have to go to another one to get them re-done. Which will probably take all day tomorrow or whenever I get around to it. Oy...
-To get more toilet paper, I had to steal some from the dadas (dada is the respectful term for men in Bengali, didi for women) who clean the Mission. Apparently they forget...
Okay, that's enough for today. Leave me comments, I love hearing from you all!
Missing you lots,
Joanna :)

Once again, sick as a...

So everyone gets sick when they come to India. Apparently if this sub-continent doesn't get you in one way, it'll get you in another. It got me in just about every way it could, but as Emma (my fell0w-Swattie/guardian angel) pointed out, at least I could still breathe. Let's just say that the last three days have not been the most pleasant ones of my life. But I"m feeling much better now, up and about etc. I've started classes here, and they're so different from back home! Kathak is amazing, the teacher is really nice, and somehow just throws things at me and I get them, plus Emma is there to help. And Bengali is the same: the teacher gave me his number and told me to call him whenever I needed any help. And yoga is also the same: I don't really know what I"m learning, but it seems to be good. Everyone is so helpful: for instance, when I mentioned that I had an upset stomach, the Kathak teacher ran out and bought me a packet of electrolytes, poured the whole thing into my water bottle, and made me drink it all! Thanks to the girls on my floor at the Mission (Emma and her friends, who checked up on me, brought me food, and made me eat dinner when that was the last thing I wanted to do), I felt very well taken care of. And now I have to run to a Kathak concert (it seems like one is always running to things here!), so talk to you all later!

Oh and I forgot

My address: Joanna Wright, Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Gol Park, Kolkata 700029, India
:)

Live from Kolkata...

It's Saturday night! Well, for you at least. For me, it's Sunday afternoon.
My trip so far...
Got into the Kolkata airport at 1 in the morning Friday the 12th, met by my "patron," I guess you could call him, Anindya, and went to the Ramakrishna Mission, where I'm staying. Words cannot describe the beauty of this place, so I'll wait until I have a camera and (hopefully) a way to post pictures. Let me just say that it's clean, simple, and full of flowers. It just so happened that the day I got there was a big day for the Mission, since it was the birthday of one of the major figures, so I was greeted with all-day music and dance concerts right in the Mission. Sadly I slept through most of it (while watching... heh heh), but I did get to hear some really beautiful singing and see some Odissi dance. Oh, and due to me not correctly changing my watch, I had the surreal experience of my body thinking it was 1 in the morning, my mind thinking it was 2 in the afternoon, and it actually being 11 in the morning. So that was my day on Friday, dozing to wonderful music with Emma (who lives two rooms away from me) and her friends.
Saturday I actually got out into Kolkata, which, after the first half hour or so, was not as scary as I thought it would be. I got registered for Bengali classes, somehow managed to find my own lunch (lo mein type stuff the guy made in front of me and put into a cardboard box and probably overcharged me for and was probably full of all sorts of bacteria, but gosh darn it, that was the best tasting expensive bacteria that I've ever encountered) and Anindya took me out to get my money exchanged, get a cell phone (whose number I will post at some point when I'm not dumb and forget to bring it with me because I haven't memorized it yet, but you probably shouldn't call anyway because it'll be really expensive), get new clothes, and also brought me to his house, where I was offered lots of sweets (the first word I learned in Bengali was mishti, which means sweet: apparently Kolkata is famous for its sweets, which puts me pretty much in heaven). Then since it was Emma's birthday she and I and some of her (and becoming my) friends went out to a restaurant for dinner.
Today I've looked into classes (mime and yoga), gotten lost, wandered around a lot, and come here. Good stuff...
So I suppose I should try to describe this place.... I don't even know where to start. I didn't actually have too much trouble with culture shock, probably because it's just so radically different that my mind is starting fresh. It's warm, the perfect temperature actually, and everything is faded, dusty, crowded, and somehow more real than back home. Everyone stares at me on the street, but I don't ever feel oppressed or threatened. It's more curiosity than anything else. Plus, I like being looked at. :p
And to wrap up, a few random things that are different:
my shower is completely vertical
at dinner the mission serves this amazing "mishti doi" (sweet yogurt): it tastes like caramel and is soooooo good!
I sleep under a mosquito net
there are random dogs everywhere, and I've seen cows and goats as well
there are no lanes on the roads, and people seem to view the use of their horns not as a priviledge or even a right, but as an obligation. the horns seem to mean "I'm coming" instead of "get out of my way"
people do just about everything in the street

Well, I suppose that's it: I'll write more at some point. I miss you all, send me e-mails! (And if you want to talk, give me a time and a number: international pay phones are pretty cheap here).
Love, Joanna :)

I'm off!!!

Leaving in an hour, finally all packed and ready to go! At this point I just want to get on the darn plane and get over there!
I'll post as soon as I get there, and also as soon as I get a cell phone: calls are good, just remember to add 11 hours. Hugs and love to everyone, and talk to you soon! :)

Worth it

OMGUH this weekend. Wow. Surreal. Amazing times with amazing people. Here's how it went down...
Saturday: 8:30 AM Roger calls me to say his flight will be late.
9:00 AM Nicole calls me to say she's in my driveway (I'm still in bed).
10:00 AM Nicole and I hop on the T to meet Roger at the airport: fun with public transportation!
11:30 AM Roger lands: yay!
12:30 PM We meet Genny and Ross in Harvard Square and have a perfectly delightful lunch at Fire and Ice.
2:30 PM We get ice cream from Herrel's (it's 70 degrees Farenheit, by the way) and walk to Genny's.
3:00 PM Nicole and Ross leave, so Genny and Roger and I go bowling in Davis Square
5:00 PM Roger and I hop on the T again (more fun with public transportation!) and go to the Frog Pond on Boston Common and ice skate: it feels very much like a romantic comedy.
6:30 PM Roger and I hop on the T yet again and go to a nice little Japanese restaurant in Brookline Village, where I get the Sushi and he gets the Sushi Deluxe (waitress: "Oh, you're trying to be he-man!") so that we can see what the difference is. Difference=two pieces of sushi filled with fish eggs, one crunchy and one exploding. Apparently the exploding one is better.
9:30 PM Roger and I finally leave the restaurant and debate riding around on the T for awhile just for fun, but that option is voted down and we go to my house.
10:30 PM I take Roger and Becky out to learn to drive stick-shift at The Cove (a park on the Charles River), and they both excel. We then sit on some swings by the Charles being delinquents.
12:00 AM We decide that what we need is IHOP, so thither we wander.
1:00 AM On the way home, stuffed with various beverages and some marvelous chocolate chip pancakes, we go around the "Circle of Death" (awful traffic circle in Newton Corner) twice just for fun, then drive around West Newton Hill to look at the mansions in the dark.
1:30 AM We get home. Becky goes to bed.
(You don't need to know what goes on here.)
5:15 AM Roger and I finally hit the hay.
Sunday 8:30 AM Roger, Becky, and I make the best pancakes in the world. Gosh, it was a pancake filled couple of days!
10:00 AM Roger and I take a walk.
1:00 PM My dad takes us out to lunch, which is only awkward because those two are so gosh-darn alike!
4:00 PM Roger and I set out for the T, and he departs, only 28 hours after arriving.

'Twas amazing. Need I say more?

I'm so badass

Pardon to any offended ears (or eyes?...). But it's the truth. Yesterday after a particularly harrowing six hours at work with a boss whose idea of a pep talk is, "Okay folks, I don't want to be here, and I know you don't, so let's just cut the funny business [by which he meant socializing and any other fun ways of passing the dead time] and get this over with," I totally told off said boss and quite passively wrenched an apology from him. It's better if you get to know him a little, so anecdotes commencing...
-When cleaning up after work: "Girls, you vaccuum and set the tables. You two [gesturing to the two male members of the waitstaff] come help me lift these tables, and let the girls do the women's work." [Well, I didn't actually hear him say that, but that was the message and intent. And it's not the only time he's said things like that.]
-He went to get spray-tanned before going to Hawaii with his girlfriend, but alleged girlfriend dumped him immediately before said trip, and said boss returned a week early from said trip with dyed hair and a lei of wretchedness and even worse attitude than before.
-My mother, upon seeing him: "... written right on his face: "Pole Up My Ass."" And as a side note, my mother is amazing.

So to the real story: this boss figure, having said to the (by the way, shorter than me and sturdy but not exactly a body-builder) guy next to me, "Come on Javier, I need your muscles to move these tables," I ever so politely said, "Ummm, Tom, would you mind not implying that women are weak? Because I'm a circus performer and I take that as an insult. Thanks." And he promptly exploded, saying that of course he wasn't implying that, and call him old school, but he wasn't going to ask a 4 foot 9, 90 pound woman to lift tables, it's just a matter of physics and what's physically possible(I'm 5 foot 6 and 130 pounds (of solid muscle, heh heh) by the way). And I, being the non-inflammatory type of lass that I am, simply lowered my head and took the verbal lashing. And then... after stewing in his own miserable juices for a few minutes, he came up to me and said, "Listen, I'm not going to change the way I think, but I apologize if you felt offended."
Score one for the easily-satisfied, passive, least violent girl you'll ever meet! Woohoo!