5 days later feels like i've been here forever!

wow it's been almost a week since i've been here and i don't know where to start! it is still surreal. i'm sitting in a small internet cafe with hot fan air blowing in my face from all angles with cars and auto rickshaws passing by on the narrow windy uphill street that this cafe sits on, while of course cows and donkeys are passing by occassionally as well.
india, oh man how i'm loving this place!! nothing like bucket showers, extreme heat, strange smells emanating from the streets, and obnoxious traffic noise everywhere. and how else do i know this place and i are meant to be? KETCHUP IS SERVED WITH FREAKIN EVERYTHING!! YESSSS!!!


starting from my 15 hour layover (originally meant to have been 12 hours, but you know how flight delays are) in the Delhi airport, i realized that pastries and anything flaky or wheat-y is always served with 2 packets of ketchup. back in the states when i did that people regarded me as strange. no people, i'm just desi at heart. deshi rather.
I was really worried genuinely for being stuck in the airport for that long with my body having no conception of time, or day, or meal times, or anything at all, and i knew that i would have to stay extra extra caffeinated to make sure that i or my luggage doesnt get stolen. but alhumudillah i made a friend :) or rather the friend found me and we ended up talking the entire night which was excellent!

i wish i could update this blog more regularly but i really dont have constant access and i'm always scared that i'm going to spill my heart and guts over some serious heart wrenching issue that i just experienced or have extremely strong opinions about that made me rethink, re-evaluate and re organize my frame of mind in terms of how i view myself and my life, and in the blink of an eye the computer would crash and everything would dissappear and all of those thoughts would dissappear into nothingness in cyberspace.

also now i'm afraid that i'm going to ramble on for so long that you are going to stop reading and click "read next blog" or something.

City Palace in Udaipur

UDAIPUR is located in the southern part of Rajasthan. It is known as the city of lakes, or better yet the little venice of Rajasthan. Too bad we are here in the summer and all the lakes are dried up and the city is parched. The famous floating palace is now sitting on patches of grass. I drink like 5 giant bottles of water and pee once a day. the place is extremely hot and extremely dry. i'm not drinking all that much water just to be healthy, i'm drinking it to be alive.

I knew I would be surprised and pleased with little things but I didn't know what type of little surprises would be around each corner. for one thing Sunrises and sunsets in India are gorgeous :) so is listening to the wide range of birds early in the morning. Our hotel essentially overlooks a lake. and in the morning I wake up to go on top of the terrace to feel a kind of peace that I think is very rare, and it comes from listening to the beautiful sounds of nature. At a certain hour of the morning a bunch of water buffalos make their way into the lake and from the terrace we can see the herd and a bunch of cows cooling off in the lake with their daily showers. It's really awesome to see a city co-exist with animals and birds and everyone is simply doing their own thing :)

the skyline of udaipur from what we can see each morning are rectangular houses colored white, pale yellow and pink etched on the sides of hills, with occasional palaces that loom high above them. the hills overlook the city and it is truly a sight. i can not imagine how beautiful this place must be in the winter when the lakes are filled. it hasn't rained here for 2 years and the lakes keep on drying up. so the level of water keeps on decreasing. global warming sucks.

This is just desribing Udaipur, or briefly describing attempting to describe it. some sights i can't really describe in words.

Other fun tid bits about my experience so far :
- people are EXTRMELY confused by me being here. I'm with a group of 5 other UNC students and they are all white. i'm brown. I speak broken hindi. so when we travel, and I speak in hindi, the automatic assumption is that I am indian. When I say I'm american that leads to confusion, and when they try to ask wait no where are you REALLY from, and i say bangladesh then the confusion comes in as to how i know hindi. i basically seem like a "dumb and in denial city indian girl" hanging out with a bunch of white kids pretending to be a western foreigner tourist. bloody me.
- we've managed to squeeze 6 people in an auto rickshaw. i think we are all trying to prove our inner Indian ness in odd ways
- chaat and aloo paratha here are amazing. and life would not start each morning without that cup of chai.


More to come later :)