Happy Birthday, Jolie!!!

Well... today went about like yesterday did as far as luck. Classes went fine, but we had a two and a half hour window of time from 1:30 to 4:00 between classes and painting our Ganesh idols. That seemed like plenty of time to run down to the !dea store and charge our cell phone minutes, so that's what Alina and I did. However, unlike all the other people who did it yesterday, we tried to do that, and it didn't work. So the workers sent us to the main branch of the !dea company. We got a number (160) and waited... and waited... and waited. We sat there for over an hour before we even got to see an attendant. And once we got to the attendant, it was another hour before she figured out what was wrong.

Then, she told us to wait fifteen minutes and sent us back to the minute-recharge station to put minutes on our phone. After twenty minutes, Alina's phone was ready to have minutes added to it. Mine wasn't. So Alina went home, and the nice man at the minute-recharge place went with me to the main branch store to figure out what was wrong. They did some stuff to my SIM card, said to give them 500 rupees ($10) and I'd have minutes on my phone within thirty minutes.

At 5:15, I got back to ACM to paint my Ganesh. At 6:30 I was done painting Ganesh, and I still had no minutes on my phone. So I walked back to the phone recharge place and asked what was wrong. They made some calls, refunded my money, fixed my SIM card, took my money back, put minutes on my phone.

At that point, it was 7:00, right around the time I was supposed to be getting home. So I went to get a rickshaw... and I just have bad luck with that. So I tried for a while to get one, and there was another girl on the corner with the same problem, and we started talking... Her name was Richeta (or something similar to that) and she's a software technician in Pune who has family in Chicago. After ten minutes or so of no rickshaws even thinking about stopping for us, we started walking together in the direction towards our homes, hoping we'd find available rickshaws along the way. After an hour of walking, trying to find an available rickshaw, and calling my host family to tell them I'd be late, Richeta finally found a rickshaw-walla willing to take me to Paud Road. I'm pretty sure I couldn't have managed without her tonight, and it's things like that that restore a little bit of my faith in humanity. She really had no reason to help me, a stranger... a foreigner... but she did. And not only did she keep me company and make the walk with me, after an hour of searching, when she finally found a rickshaw, she directed him to take me home instead of taking it herself.

So, I finally got back to my host family's at about 8:30 tonight. I have blisters on the bottoms of my feet from all the walking... I missed lunch because my lunch break was spent in the !dea store, so I ate a ton of food for dinner. I watched my aai cook dinner, and we talked about spices and what we use in cooking. It was pretty nice. Also, as an appetizer, she gave me a plate full of salted limes. I think normal people would probably be a little displeased with this, but as the kid who used to (and still does when no one's looking) sit and eat the lemon slices that come with water at restaurants, I was pretty excited about it.

Also, today, I received an invite to a book launch today. Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil, the gay prince of India, is launching a book, and our Lit professor hooked us all up with invitations. I'm actually kind of excited about it.