50 Girls vs Independence
2009
Hey folks,
I just thought it might be a good idea to write a little update on my life here in Delhi. While I had told you last time that I was about to check out a nice festival with Navarun and Vrishali on Monday last week, that didn’t work out. So I had to stay at „alcatraz“, thus on campus. While monday nothing interesting happened, tuesday was great.
Learning Hindi
The girl I had met when I was out with Navarun the first Friday after I arrived here had told me to ask a guy named Peter if he had a place for me to stay. Moreover she had told me that he was giving classes in Hindi, thus I called him on Tuesday. Turned out that no room was available, but a Hindi class had just started. Great, flexible as I am I saw myself sitting on some nice roof in the evening waiting for the class to begin. Some girls showed up and after a short chat with one of them I found myself talking in French to her as she was French 🙂 Guess what, she asked me whether I was French as well!!! 😀 Anyhow, turned out that the class wasn’t going to be in german as I had thought initially but in english and thought by a russian girl 😉 Gosh, she’s got a pace… Unbelievable, on thursday we already saw a scene of a film WITHOUT subtitles, but I guess when I’ll keep following class, I’ll really be able to speak at least some Hindi at the end of my three month down here! 🙂 So now I’m learning Hindi twice a week and it really makes fun so far 🙂
Welcome to Green Park
Apart from that nothing really important happened EXEPT that I finally moved out of alcatraz and into a proper apartment that is way beyond what I had hoped for to find! I’ll put some pics up over the next couple of days but I can’t tell you how happy I am 🙂 It’s located in „Green Park“, a very nice neighborhood in South Delhi and thus close to my working place at TERI and even closer to the place where I’ve language class 🙂 Moreover I’ve a market close by AND a McDonalds as well as a PizzaHot! The ones who know me might think „What, in Germany he would NEVER go there!“ and you’re totally right, BUT a) after having had 10 days only Indian food I was a bit fed up with it and b) my stomach doesn’t react very well to it… (Which is quite a pity cause in general I like the Indian food!). BUT it gets even better: My flatmate is a very nice guy and we get along really good 🙂 Moreover he used to live in London for quite some time thus is used to „western lifestyle“ and guess where he took me today… To a supermarket that offers EVERYTHING I could wish for!!! It’s basically a european store in India – they have everything including lots of german stuff 😀 Alright, it’s a bit expensive, but I gotta find a way to spend the money somehow, right? 😉
Bengali Festival
Over the last weekend a festival of the bengali community was happening and Navarun and Vrishali took me down there. It was interesting to see and I’ll upload the pics soon. Afterwards we searched for a restaurant Navarun „the fake gps“ had in mind and ended up running in circles for 45 minutes!!! Gosh, I was so dead when we finally reached the place… The thing is, down here it seems that if you ask for directions, even somebody who’s NO idea where it might be will give you a direction… But the food was REALLY great and I had a very typical bengali fish 🙂 „Wow, this one is spicy!“ „Oh right, i forgot to tell you that it’s one of the really spicy dishes!“ … Good that I like spicy food, other than that I would have had a huge problem (and Navarun as well… 😉 ). When I came back to alcatraz on saturday late in the evening (22h) the guards told me that I was WAY too late – another reason I wanted to get out there as fast as possible – constant surveillance…
Moving out of Alcatraz
That became true yesterday. Even though the taxi driver I thought they had ordered never came (as nobody ordered one) and they finally „ordered“ a guy to bring me to my new home who I think might be the sun of one of the guards cause a) he didn’t know his way around, b) wasn’t driving a „usual“ taxi and c) had a – let’s say – creative way of driving… (Once he was really wrong and instead of turning over on the next crossing, he simply drove backwards for a couple hundred meters on a six lane highway…). Welcome to India 😀 Anyway, I arrived safe and since then enjoyed my life round here VERY MUCH with western food, a huge bed and internet that’s fast and not censored 🙂
50 Girls vs Independence
Just to be fair, I really enjoyed my time on campus as well – which is no wonder if you’re the only guy with 50 girls around… 😉 Still, having my own room and bath, including a nice living room and kitchen just makes a huge difference. I regained lots of privacy and now can get back to my normal way of living – working long in the night and getting up rather late 🙂 YEAH! Still, I’ll miss the girls cause they were really nice. On Wednesday I was part of an Indian birthday party that was – quite an experience… I had two telephone conferences and finished with the first shortly before midnight. I asked the girls that had entered the public living room what was going on and they told me about the upcoming birthday. So I asked what I should do. „Hiding“ 😀 Alright, that was easy and rather normal. When the girl who had birthday came into the room we reappeared and sung a nice „Happy Birthday“. Nothing special so far? Right. As I was running out of battery I went to my room and when I came back with the cable I was a little bit stunned: Aside form the cake the girls had made they had prepared some kind of chocolate creme as well. Guess what, the birthday girl had the creme now all over her face!!! And then the girls started greasing everybody else with it as well… Let me put it like this – at some point I missed the opportunity to disappear quietly and thus I ended up having lots of chocolate all over my face as well… 😀 Don’t ask me what weird tradition that follows, but it seems to be „normal“ round here?!
Ok, I guess that’s it for now. Oh, on the request of a friend of mine I will make it possible to subscribe to newletters by mail for each category I’m blogging in. But therefore I need to tweak the sidebar a little bit which I’ll do over the next week. Until then you can subscribe only to the „India Project“ category if you enter your mail into the widget on the right 🙂
All the best,
Strothi