(It won't let me type captions under the pictures so I'll list them briefly here. The first two are of my room in the hostel, next is Jackie and Liz at the rooftop restaurant, Liz on our adventure, a picture of the Pondicherry Freedom Jam that took place on the beach, and me striking some sort of pose in the French Quarter in Pondi!)
The past week has been spent trying to figure out the five
classes I’ll be taking this semester. I’m taking Media Studies (English),
Feminist Studies (English), Indian Sociological Perspectives, Medical
Anthropology, and Practical and Classical Yoga. Choosing classes takes a while
here, as it requires meeting several professors to see if I can sit in on their
class, sitting in for a day or two, and then deciding. Also, it is fairly
common for teachers to attend conferences/not have class, and they rarely tell
students when classes are cancelled. This has happened a few times already, but
since it is fairly common, it’s given me a chance to get to know some of the
Indian students in my classes. It’s frustrating to wait for fifteen or twenty
minutes for the bus to take me from my hostel/dorm to the social sciences &
humanities department block (which is about the size of Hendrix, everything is
big and spread out here!), get to class and realize it has been cancelled, and
then go wait for the bus again. It’s okay though, I’m getting used to it…and I
have started bringing a book everywhere I go, and have been reading a lot.
I take the bus back to my hostel for lunch most days. The
bus is often so crowded that dozens of people stand in the aisles, and more
than once I’ve seen boys hanging on to the outside of the bus as it is moving!
Liz and I went into Pondi the other day to buy a bicycle to share. We’ll be
riding it to and from class instead of always taking the bus, which will be
convenient.
Last Saturday, Kara, Lauren, Jackie, Liz and I took the bus
into Pondi to explore the French quarter. We had tea on a rooftop restaurant
for 35 rupees (50 cents or so), which was lovely. Tea time (5pm) is a big thing
here, and dinner doesn’t start until 7:30. Liz and I stumbled across a
bookstore and left loaded down with Indian fiction. In the evening, we listened
to live music on the beach (it was Republic Day, so there was a concert going
on, a parade, and the main park was lit up with neon lights). We were craving
American food pretty badly at this point, and split a chicken tikka pizza at
Pizza Hut. It was pretty expensive, though, and the restaurant itself was much,
much nicer than Pizza Hut in the US! All kinds of things besides pizza were on
the menu: salad, pasta, cheesecake…it was delicious. Best pizza ever (not
really, but it was so good).
On Sunday, Liz and I went on an epic adventure to nearby
Auroville, the intentional sustainable community. I say epic adventure because
we underestimated how far it was, and got extremely lost. We had planned on
taking the bus to the main road, walking to the visitor’s center, and reading
somewhere and just relaxing. Instead, this is what happened:
-Liz saved me from being hit by a motorcycle driver by
pulling my backpack back just in time
-We walked for 2-3 hours, along the way finding: children
that tried to take my camera, a pottery shop offering classes for 200 rupees (4
dollars or so), Farm Fresh – a local supermarket & restaurant, a coconut
disaster (I bought a coconut, we shared the juice, and once it was cut in half
I was savoring the meat inside when I stumbled on a dirt-covered hill, holding
onto the coconut shell but dropping the meat in the dirt…I thought about eating
it for a second but then reconsidered), stumbling across a Tamil village where
no one knew where the visitor center was (hint: by now we are officially lost)
and from there we kept walking…oops…were given directions by 5 people who kept
telling us it was “just 1 km more, just 1.5 km more!” watched some boys playing
a game of cricket, finally stumbled across the back entrance to the visitor
center (where the bemused security guard told us to turn at a eucalyptus tree),
and FINALLY made it to Auroville.
-Once we got there, I looked at the events listed on the
bulletin board (they look awesome, lots of gardening, an eco music festival,
etc.) and Liz and I read for a while. What a day. A bit more than we bargained
for, but I had a blast. I think we walked between 6-8 miles during that time…
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