August 9th, 2009

India! I arrived at my home stay family’s home and my home for 145 days at 11:30 a.m. on Aug. 3^rd after the longest travelling time of my life. Glad to be done with the trip, but a new friend and good books about food like the Botany of Desire by Michael Pollen and The Gospel of Food by Barry Glassner.

I am living in one of two flats with three other IPSL students, an eighty plus nanny, and Rekha, an India student that also boards with us. Mo lives in the other flat with Aunti, who is her son Indi’s nanny. Indi is twenty years old, but it seems that once a nanny is with a family, they can become part of the family. Fact: Aunti and Unka are affectionate names used for men and women. Indi has just left though with his friend Adam that was visiting to go to Japan, but we may bump into each other again in October if he comes back home to visit. Living with me is my roommate Josh, a twenty year old from St. Louis, Mo going to school at Elmhurst College in Chicago who happens to be the only other boy on the program out of the twelve students. Considering that most of us IPSL kids have roommates, I was putting the pieces together and anticipated that we would be living together. Yep, I’m thinking Mr. Holmes will be asking me for help any day now. Alix is one of three IPSL kids that goes to school in Kalamazoo, MI. Quite a few Kalamazoo students come every year it seems, and they stay later than the rest of us because of their trimester schedule. Alix lives with Rekha and lives in our flat. The other student that lives with Mo is Jenny. Jenny is unfortunately only with us for a short three week period before she goes back to school in California, her home state. So that’s the India family: Josh, Alix, Jenny, Rekha, Mo, Aunti, Cook-man (I’ll remember the name soon), Nanny, and the cheese head (yours truly).

As far as the service aspect of the show, which is a large part of my service-learning study abroad program, there has been slow progress. We have been visiting all of the potential sites and trying to register with Mother Teresa’s NPO, which feels like a stereotypical visit to the local DMV. Yeah bureaucracy and nuns! I’ll keep y’all posted on the service developments, but for now I am just going with the flow and keeping my feathers straight.

School. Maybe one of the least popular words in the English language for a student to hear that is studying abroad. Yes, school is a part of my study abroad and on that note; we have had a few meetings and one lecture. I already can tell from our one wandering lecture and from talking with friends that the style of schooling will be a little different than at home. I’ll reserve any feelings until I have more than one class (haha). Anyhow, I’m excited to learn about India as much as I can so I say, bring it on!

The weather is in the ninety’s most days and humid. To give you more descriptive example, I step out of the apartment’s gate onto the pathway in the morning. I walk for five minutes and I’m sweating. Yep, five minutes into the day and I’m wiping down. Good thing too, because if you are not sweating then you my friend, are most likely dehydrated. Yikes. But don’t worry everyone; my pee is a pale yellow.

And with that tidbit, I will now return to my life in India. I’ll try to keep this updated as much as possible over these next five months (Aug. 3^rd-December 20^th), but with school and service starting soon we will see how much energy I can muster to type these out. And please feel free to comment, email me at obriend07@gmail.com, or Facebook. And I will try to post some photos as well. Finally, I think I will end each post with a new Bengali word that I’ve learned. This time, the word of the post is…alu. Alu means potato, one of my favorite dishes here that we have for meals. Prepared with a sauce that is yet TBD, it is a solid staple catering to my Irish roots. Done.