Tourism and beginning Hindi

Let's see...on Saturday we did some sightseeing in Delhi. The first place we went was the Red Fort, a giant walled fortress in Old Delhi built by Shah Jahan (same dude that built the Taj) and occupied by the Mughal emperors. There were some guys on top of the wall at the front of the fort mowing the grass that was growing on some soil at about a 75- or 80-degree incline. They had the lawn mower on a rope. It was pretty crazy.

The architecture is beautiful and inside are gigantic gardens and (now empty) pools and channels and such. I had heard that sometimes monkeys hang out at the fort, but sadly, I didn't see any.

After the Red Fort, we went to lunch at a delectable all-you-can-eat restaurant called Rajdhani, where you start off with a giant round plate, on top of which are seven little bowls. The waiters come and scoop a different dish into each bowl, plus rice and bread and chutneys that go on the plate. And they keep refilling the food, sometimes even when you say you don't want anymore. It was awesome. When we were in the taxis on the way to the restaurant, we were driving through Old Delhi, and I discovered that it has a much greater animal population than New Delhi. In addition to lots of cows (more than the area where I live), the old part of the city has horses, donkeys, and goats walking down the street or hanging out on sidewalks. I tried to get some pictures, but there was too much traffic.

After lunch we went to the Indira Gandhi Museum, which is in the house she lived (and died) in. They have some rooms walled off behind glass that are still decorated and furnished as they were when she lived there. (And apparently India went through the same terrible late 1970s/early 1980s style that the U.S. did...browns and plaids and some generally aesthetically displeasing color schemes and decorations. All of the books and pretty wood furniture made up for that. Oh, and the diamond encrusted sword and dagger that were given as gifts from Saudi Arabia. Sparkly.) Other rooms are just walls plastered with newspaper articles about her and photos from her and her family's collections, or ones that people have donated. Inside the house they have her wedding sari and all the objects used in her wedding ceremony, as well as the blood-stained sari she was wearing when she was shot. Outside are lovely gardens and the sidewalk where her bodyguards shot her. The last 20 yards or so are covered with ripply glass, which the signs said was supposed to symbolize a river (or time? life? tears? who knows), and the spot where she fell has its own plaque and is covered with a sheet of clear glass. It also has a full-time guard stationed right beside it.

So those were our fun cultural things for the day. Saturday night, the homestay families came to pick up their students, so six people moved out of the house, my roommate among them. IES apparently has a policy that if doubles can be filled, they must be, so on Sunday morning I moved upstairs to live with another girl whose roommate is now in a homestay. There are three empty rooms on the first floor now, the last one being occupied by the two boys who decided to stay here, and the second floor has four doubles that are all fully occupied. My new roommate's name is Rachel, and she's from Illinois...the room looks the same, only slightly bigger and with a tiny little balcony thing (which is better than my last one, which gave me a stunning view of concrete and barbed wire). The outlets are wired properly, though, which is a huge plus. Hooray electricity.

Speaking of electricity, we've had a bunch of power outages in the last few days, several at night when it's dark and therefore nothing to do. However, they must have our computers and Internet running on generators because the computers in the basement and the wireless internet both work when the power is out. I was really confused at first, but I'm very glad to be able to sit in a dark room with the little glow of my computer screen when the power's out at 9 p.m. and I don't want to go to bed.

Sunday we had a free day to explore Delhi on our own, so we went out to lunch and did a bunch of shopping. I'm fairly certain that most people in Delhi spend most of their time eating and shopping. It seems like there's a market on every block and restaurants squeezed in every corner. It's pretty cool.

Yesterday morning we began intensive Hindi (at 8:30 a.m....ew). It's pretty fun trying to learn a new alphabet at the same time you're learning grammar and vocabulary...I don't really understand how that's supposed to work. The more logical way, in my opinion, would be to learn the alphabet first, but that's just me. We're learning a little bit of everything all at the same time.

We had a session after lunch with a hippy therapist lady named Dhyan, who's from Southern California and now counsels ex-pats in India in order to make money to send her adopted Tibetan daughter to college in a couple years. She's quite a character. In theory, this little group meeting was a good idea, but it ended up being a waste of time. She has a very odd attitude for someone who's supposed to be giving advice.

After that, we went to Jawaharlal Nehru University, partly because three of us hadn't heard anything about whether we'd been admitted or not. After crazy Indian bureaucracy and stupidity, turns out that it's up to each department to decide whether casual students are allowed. Cate informed me and the people we spoke to at JNU that there were three IES students last semester that took sociology classes there without any problems, but the head of the department said I had been rejected because I didn't have my bachelor's degree. We explained that I'm in my third year of a four-year program at a competitive school, and that the American university system is different from the Indian one, in which a bachelor's degree only takes three years. I was informed that the faculty panel that makes these decisions had reviewed my case twice (though they didn't ask me or IES for any additional information between the first and second times...), and that they had agreed I wasn't qualified. More talking and more frustration and she told me that if I wanted, I could reapply and give them the additional information they had needed (like what classes I would want to take, even though that office couldn't give me the class schedule or listing or descriptions and it's not available online!). The problem with that is she couldn't tell me when the panel would be able to review it yet again and make another decision, and JNU classes already started. So...yeah. I haven't decided what I'm going to do about that...I may end up just taking classes at Ramjas College (part of Delhi University) for fun. I can have two of my IES classes transfer towards my anthropology degree, so it's not an issue of getting credit; it's just incredibly annoying. Though bureaucracy and inefficiency seems to be a way of life here. One of the few aspects of India I don't love.

Today was more Hindi and another lunch (this one an all-you-can-eat buffet), and we have the afternoon free. There's a preschool at the YMCA (where the IES center is), and we were hanging out on the grass waiting to go to lunch watching the little kids. Today is Lohri, the festival to worship fire, and most of the kids had costumes or special Lohri clothes on, and one little girl was coming around wishing us a happy Lohri and offering us popcorn (which apparently is a treat mostly reserved for the holidays here). So adorable. We're going to a Lohri celebration this evening, and it looks like they're setting up for a big bonfire/party in the park across the street from the house, too. It'll be a fun evening.

I'll be posting pictures from the Red Fort/Indira Gandhi museum/randoms on my Flickr page soon, but right now I'm going to go enjoy the sunshine. :)