The Sky is Falling!

Friday, September 17^th

Today, I met His Highness, Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil of Raj Pipla, Rajasthan. We got invited to his palace... he said to just call whenever we want to come visit to give him some notice, and he'd be happy to show us around his palace. Raj Rao, an author, is our Indian Lit professor, and his newest book was released tonight. He is good friends with the prince, so the prince came to the release, and Raj introduced us. It was pretty awesome. I have now met a prince. Also, the prince is a musician. Apparently, the funny accordion-like instrument that I've been seeing is called a harmonia, and it is what Prince Manvendra plays. There's going to be a conference on music at his palace in a couple of weeks, and I'm kind of hoping we can make our visit to his palace coincide with this conference; there are going to be all sorts of amateur and professional performances, and I want to see it.

Other than the book release, today was just kind of chaotic. Sarah and I went to find the travel agent to pay for our train tickets to Goa in October. That in itself was an ordeal. It took four people giving four different sets of different directions to the same place for us to find the travel agency.

After that, we did a little shopping. Our resource guide recommended a jewelry store near the travel agency, so we made a pitstop there, and I dished out almost Rs. 400 on jewelry. Quite the spending spree (it converts to a little over $8). For that amount, I got a pair of silver hoop earrings about the size of a quarter, a ring, and a pair of “diamond” earrings. The salesgirl was pretty insistent that this pair of earrings was made with real diamonds, and hey... if she believes it, I will. They are little hoops designed like a celtic knot/triquetra, and they have tiny little diamond chips in them. They were my “expensive” buy, and they cost about ¾ of what I spent.

Our shopping spree was followed by going back to ACM and playing word games for an hour or so before we left for the book release. It was nice to just hang out with some American kids and play weird nerdy games. The book release was really long: over two hours of sitting in a bookstore listening to Raj and the prince and other people talk. But I was pretty content because I found a copy of Lord of the Rings to read. I wish I had brought one of my copies of the book so I could read it in my nonexistent spare time here. Finding it in the bookstore was like finding a little piece of home. Also, the Elvish Tengwar script is incredibly similar to the Devanagari (Marathi/Hindi/Sanskrit) script. I'm pretty sure Tolkien used Devanagari as inspiration for his Elvish writings like he used the Norse Futhark runes as inspiration for his Dwarvish letters. And, while I was contemplating that, I started thinking about the elves themselves in the book, and the possiblity that they could have been based on Indian people if their language was based on the Indian script. When we think of elves, we tend to picture the blonde haired, blue eyed, light skinned beauties pretty much as Peter Jackson depicted them in his movie. However, I remembered in particular that in Tolkien's book, Legolas (as well as Arwen, Elrond, and others) had dark hair. So I started looking up descriptions of the Elvish characters in the book I had to see if I could find a description of the elves to get a more accurate description of their appearances. As far as I can tell, one doesn't exist. I looked at the passages introducing Gandalf (he's not actually an elf, but the wizards have a historical link to elves, so I checked), Glorfindel, Elrond, Arwen, Legolas, Nimrodel (an elven-maiden in a song Legolas sings), Haldir and the elven scouts, Galadriel and Haldir, and Saruman (another Wizard), and only twice in all those descriptions does Tolkien ever mention skin. In the descriptions of the two girls, Arwen and Nimrodel, he says their “limbs are white.” But, it almost seems at points like Tolkien goes out of his way to avoid mentioning skin, and I find that rather interesting. In the description of Saruman, Tolkien describes grey hair that still has patches of darkest black in it, and he states that Saruman has dark eyes. The elves of Lothlorien are described as having hair reminiscent of shadows. His aversion to mentioning skin is kind of interesting, and I wonder if that was purposeful or just part of Tolkien's writing style. I also noticed that he tends to be rather vague about his characters descriptions.

So... today, I met a prince, and yet Lord of the Rings is my dominant topic of discussion. Good job.

The book opening lasted longer than we expected. It started at 6, and I think it was 8:30 before we got out of there. Kaka Raju (Emily's and my rickshaw driver) was supposed to pick us up at a restaurant across town at 9:30, so we had some finagling to do at that point... there was no way we could count on Indian time to have us fed and ready to go in an hour. So, Emily called Kaka and asked him to be there at 10 instead of 9:30, but his English is kind of sketchy, and our Marathi doesn't really extend to that sort of conversation yet. We also called/texted our host families so they would know where we were. And then at 9:20 he called and said he was waiting outside. At that point, we had ordered dinner and were waiting for it to get there, and he agreed to wait. I had ordered a vegetable stir-fry which turned out to actually be a vegetable-and-lots-of-mushrooms-that-make-me-sick stir-fry, so I ended up passing my plate around to everyone else to eat, and I had rice for dinner.

I got back to my host family's apartment, started writing a blog, and fell asleep halfway through.

Current blister count: 10.

Saturday, September 18^th

News from today: Dengue breakout in ACM! There are about five who have it. Five down, twenty-one to go. Who'll be next?

ACM is apparently spraying the building with insecticides in hopes of keeping the nasty Dengue-carrying mosquitos away from the rest of us. I hope it works, because I'd prefer to keep up my sick-free streak. I'm kind of a fan of not feeling gross.

Sunday, December 19^th

Today, I made breakfast. It was my first experience cooking since I got to India, and it went pretty well. There was no baking powder, so I used baking soda. I'm not entirely sure what kind of flour I used. And the milk... well... they don't separate milk and cream like we do in the states, so it was kind of lumpy and had a solid layer of fat on top. But, the pancakes turned out pretty well. Emily came over to eat pancakes, so it was just a pretty good morning.

Yesterday was the last day of the Hindu holy month, so my family is no longer doing a non-veg fast. Tonight, Aai is making a non-veg feast for the family (and something that isn't dead for me) to celebrate the first day in a month and a half that they can eat meat. Maybe they'll let me invite some of the non-veg ACM students over for dinner sometime, because I think I'm in one of the only families that eats meat.

Today is laundry day, round two. I'm kind of glad I brought so many clothes because I only have to do laundry every couple of weeks. The washing machines are different here. Basically, you fill a machine full of soapy water and clothes, and then it mixes them around. The machines don't fill themselves, and they don't have some special place to put soap so it will mix in later. Then, you manually drain the washing machine, move the clothes to the “dryer.” The dryer basically does what our washers at home do: it spins the clothes really fast so that instead of soaking wet clothes, you have kind wet clothes. Then you hang things to dry. Basically, the whole process is a few steps up from handwashing things in a bucket, but a whole lot more interactive than I'm used to.

Those tiles are 1ftx1ft... and that's the big pieces of the rock once it hit the floor. 

So, my life flashed before my eyes a little bit tonight. I called my parents tonight. They've been out traveling around Arkansas and Missouri and doing some camping, so I haven't been able to chat with them in the mornings like I normally do. I went out and sat on the balcony to talk. We were wrapping up our conversation, and a chunk of concrete bigger than my head displaced itself from the balcony above me and landed right next to me. I got showered by dust and smaller chunks of concrete, and the big piece (after splitting in half) hit me on the bounce. Yes, concrete can bounce. The balcony door was open, and the debris got scattered in through my room, and there were even little grape-sized chunks of concrete all the way into the hallway past my room. I was about a foot away from experiencing my first trip to an Indian hospital. I'm a little terrified to go out on the balcony now. The sky is falling, and I'm still picking it out of my hair! (In all seriousness, though... I really am).