Welcome to the Jungle

So, after the first two days in the city, there are a few things I have picked up on:

The natural state of man is murder.  Police officers are a rare and whimsical breed of men.  Because of this, they are never around, and as such, never enforce any type of traffic law.  Without the fear of speeding tickets, pedestrian crosswalk violations, and prosecution from murder, the natural state of man is to drive as fast and as dangerously as possible over their follow man.  Crossing a street in India is like playing  a real-life game of sudden-death Frogger. 

It’s weird to be white.  Yesterday we stopped by a roadside stand for a freshly sliced coconut when an excited chattering family surrounded our group, and shoved their daughter at us.  Our translator explained that they wanted to take pictures with all the white people.  The novelty of our paleness was not limited to that one occasion- on the contrary, people stared at us all day, wherever we went. I was not expecting to be the most exotic and exciting thing in India.

People really do wear traditional clothing.  Clothing has a really weird gender line in India: Men all wear western clothing- a button down and slacks is pretty much the national uniform. By contrast however,  women on the street very rarely wear anything but traditional clothing .  With a very few exceptions, the biggest indicator of western influence on Indian fashion is skinny jeans, worn with the traditional butt-covering Kurta.  I kinda mocked my university for requesting us to dress in traditional clothing, but n ow that I am here, I really see the wisdom. During orientation, our guide Jacob John explained that  most Indian people are not familiar with white women beyond those they see in TV and movies.  Because of this, there is a concept of American women all being raging slutbags, and in many cases are treated as such.   Wearing traditional clothing here isn’t just a novelty, it really is a way for foreign women to attempt to blend in, and keep much of the slutbag treatment in check. 

I will never be as cool as anyone from Norway.  So far I have met graduate students from France, England, and Norway, and I must say, globe-trotting Europeans are really quite a swell bunch of humanity.  On the first night, Niana and I were trying to find some people in our group to go for dinner, when we ran into a group of Norweigans who invited us out for dinner.  On the way, there cool and well travled young people talked to us about their lives as social working students in Bangalore.  It was neat to hear not only about their lives back home, but also some of their tips and tricks for navigating the city.  Sitting at a table with four different nationalities in another country, sharing stories was really an amazing experience. 

On that note, India itself is really an amazing experience.  It’s hotter than hell, I can’t show my ankles, and the odds of being killed by a moped are high- it’s completely different from anything that I have ever experienced.  But that is what makes it s wonderful. I am in a great country, with a great group of people who are just as excited and nervous to be here as I am, and the freedom of that is really beautiful.   Without a cultural frame of reference, I am really interested to see how I will develop-character wise over the course of the next several weeks.  At home I am known and shaped by all the things I've done and  am associated with- I am an ambitious Lutheran, who likes loud jewelry and Dr.Who- with out access to any of that, I wonder what that means for my identity?

Plane Pain

(Wrote this above Hong Kong Monday Morning)

So during my thirty plus hours of journeying today, I have had a lot of time to think, and have come to the conclusion that international travel is really an earthly form of purgatory.  You literally sit in a box for 15 hours, and let nothing happen to you., then get on another plain, and do it again . It’s so frustrating. Hours of driving to the airport, waiting to get on the plane, waiting to get off the plane…  My conspiracy theory of the day is that the airlines invented  teleportation years ago, and  sit us in rocking, video screen window boxes and laugh at our futility while they take all our money. 

Granted, that thought was born entirely of 24 hours of sleep deprivation, combined with my unrequited fetish for Mr. Spock.

So I am doing all this traveling, sitting in this teleportation box so that I can somehow or another get to India, and spend a month admiring  the culture in the idealistically “gritty” manner of a white middle class college student. 

I Am Excited. About:

  History. India is such a historic, mystic place., home to religions three times as old a hundred times more unfamiliar to me than that particular brand of Baptist brainwashing that I have grown up with living in the south.

Native People.   I  think it will be a good experience for me to be a minority.  Even on this plane, I feel like a pale  awkward giant surrounded in a sea of  petite dark heads and velvety brown eyes.

Adventure:  Most of all, I am excited about doing something four continents outside of my comfort zones. 

I Am Nervous About:

 Flying: I hate air travel.  I have all these old testament inspired fears of God striking down the unworthy. I can think of several descriptive and colorful phrases that have left my mouth in the last week, and I hope that my climbing in a little metal tube and shoving myself under His nose doesn’t make Someone’s smiting finger a little twitchy. .  (Kidding about this kind of, but in all seriousness I don’t really  feel comfortable riding anything farther off the ground than  Michel Phelps;)

The food.  While delicious, I am growing ever more worried that  a prolonged diet of highly spiced and exotic food is  going to anger my already disgruntle digestive system into producing something  that will rival the Ganghes in consistency and force.

So here I sit, cards on the folding airline table, recording the ravings of a greasy  sleep deprived mad woman.  I really don’t knw what the hell I am doing for the next four weeks, and while I am excited to find out, there is definitely a little bitt of trepidation in with the excitement  We get our schedules tomorrow, and judging buy the fact we wont be back at our rooms until four  tonight, yet they  schedule our first meeting at ten in the morning, USAC is run by a bunch of meany-pants sadists.

But I will deal with their  wicked ways later.   Right now I am going to take my leopard print travel pillow, and see if I can “accidently”  curl up on the shoulder of  the man next to me, thereby making him uncomfortable enough to surrender  the armrest to my innocently dreaming self., for the last hour of my last flight.

Ready or not  India,  here I come.