New Discoveries:

 Outside the Qutb Salih Tombs.  These used to all be bright turquoise and green.

 Inside the tombs!

 Light traffic in the Old City, outside Charminar.

1. Even if you follow the Good American Traveler in India rule and drink bottled water constantly to stay hydrated, you will not be rewarded by plentiful toilets.  Men seem to be able to relieve themselves anywhere, but women have to cope with the one toilet every 10 miles rule.

2. Speaking of men relieving themselves, we witnessed a man defecate in a river, stand up, pull up his pants, and give us a 360 degree view of his...intimates.  Proof of why we should wait a bit to drink the water.

3. Anything you do here is way cooler simply because you're in India.  Showering, brushing teeth, eating at a restaurant, walking around barefoot, jogging - these are all things I do on a regular basis at home.  Here, each is a crazy walk on the wild side.  The showers may or may not be hot, your teeth may or may not be doused in the afformentioned water, the restaurant will not serve you silverwear and you might realize in a hot flash that you are to mix the foods together with your hands (so fun.  food fingerpainting.), walking around barefoot may give you some fatal disease but is also required at beautiful though gender segregated mosques, and jogging casually with a new friend, you might also find yourself accompanied by a university student on a motorbike driving slowly alongside so that he can pepper you with questions about the U.S. and inform you about the current state of the caste system.

4.  Crossing the street is an epic adventure.  Always.  You are human frogger, dodging auto-rickshaws, motorbikes, vans, cars, cabs, pedestrians, peeing men, darting children, and gigantic buses.  Your adrenaline levels are soaring each time you cross.  There is no casual sauntering.

5. Beautiful ancient ruins don't just look beautiful.  They make you feel as if everything inside of you has been emptied out and left somewhere far away.  They make you feel clean and leave you gasping.  Hyderabad, not a very popular tourist attraction in the subcontinent, is home to some breathtaking ruins, including Charminar, Golconda fort, and some ancient Muslim Tombs.  Pictures to come.

6. You get sandal tan lines mad fast.

Landing. Lagging.

I am writing this at about seven in the  morning Hyderabad time, after waking up from a much needed 10-hour night's sleep.  I arrived in Hyderabad Monday morning at about 3 am, after 25 hours of flying and one very hurried layover in Qatar.  (Qatar remains my favorite country.  Airport security lets you keep your shoes on).  Interesting fact: in the Hyderabad airport, it seems pretty common to wait 1-2 hours at the baggage claim until your luggage comes out, or, as in my case, until a sympathetic woman tells you to stop standing there blankly and look along the far wall, where dozens of bags have been pulled off the carousel and lined up, waiting for their respectful owners.  At this point, I had run into a bunch of kids from my program, and we all set off together into the Indian night.

Unlike other airports I've been to, people do not come inside the building to pick up their arriving friend/loved one/business assignment/group of lost looking American students wearing strange assemblages of clothing.  Rather, everyone waits in a huge mass directly outside the building behind a railing, and stares at you intensely as you walk toward your CIEE sign.  To be honest, I felt a bit like I was facing the paparrazzi, only without cameras.  Or a red carpet. 

All of us manuevered through the airport parking lots with our huge duffels and goofy sleepless grins until we reached a bus with blue floral curtains covering the windows.  We enjoyed a very fun and bizarre ride through the dark Hyderabad countryside until we arrived, nearly an hour later, at the University.  Which is enormous.  Maybe picture a campus the size of ASU, replace 95% of the buildings with trees and fields, and then add in a few monkeys, oxes, and dogs running around.  And then put the Tagore International House at the very back.

We arrived at the house at about 5:30 in the morning.  All of us were pretty wired, as in our respective homelands it was closer to 5:30 in the afternoon.  We got our room assignments and then roamed around like the afformentioned monkeys checking out the building, trying to stay up until 8 am, when they would serve us breakfast.  We watched a very beautiful, very surreal pink sunrise and later ate what would soon be known as "the best eggs ever ever ever in my life."

And then, we set out to stay awake until evening.  This was very difficult, as all of us had been traveling for two days and hadn't slept much during that time.  So my first day in India felt like the longest day of my life.  I went on three long, exploratory walks, ate a LOT of food, and visited this crazy temple to Vishnu built into a large conglomoration of boulders, all the while feeling as though my brain was made out of cotton.  I finally passed out last night around 8:45.  Jet lag is a foreign (haha...literally...) experience to me, but coupled with all the other crazy new things happening all around me, it feels somehow suitable. 

On a different note, a man sang us lines from a Langston Hughes poem yesterday.  It was nice.

Sheikh Insomnia

When I applied to study abroad in India, I had a long list of reasons for wanting to go.  Now, suspended over the Atlantic Ocean at an indeterminable hour of the night, the only reason I can remember is that it is supposed to be very warm.  Unlike this airplane.  In fact, spending my spring semester in Hyderabad, India will allow me to skip winter almost entirely.

                My poor blood circulation aside, this is really quite a big adventure for me.  I’ve never traveled outside the U.S. before, much less alone, and much less to a country most people – from the lady at the bank who opened my credit card account, to respected friends and family, to the kid who has nothing to do late at night besides chat up the barista at the Green Bean – have told me is dangerous, overwhelming, and “going to eat you alive.”  While India may be all these things, the same adjectives can apply to Los Angeles.  Needless to say, I have not let such advice dissuade me from packing up, laying aside my liberal-arts soft knit sweaters, and heading out to spend a semester in a country I’ve wanted to travel to my whole life.  The good news about this blog is, if I am eaten alive, you will know about it promptly.

                I’m well into flight number two of my 25-hour long travel saga, and so far, things are going good.  And by good, I mean that Qatar Airways, the most beautiful and magnanimous service providers on earth, has mysteriously and unexpectedly bumped me to first class.  Qatar, if you don’t know, is a small country in the Middle East that sticks out of the Arabian Peninsula like a hitchhiker’s thumb.  Beyond its claim to fame as the upcoming host of the 2022 World Cup, Qatar boasts a great international airport in Doha, its capital city.  Well, I don’t know if it’s great.  But seeing as Qatar is now and forever my favorite country, I am prone to raving.

                I’ve never flown business class, ever.  I assume that all people who fly first class also take yachts to school, and live in old English Mansions, and use “summer” as a verb, and take baths in big tubs the size of my room in Berkus House.  I also assume they are all flying to photoshoots.  But the people who fly the kind of first class I’m used to seeing in the U.S. Airways antechamber look like paupers compared to the luxury offered in this place.

                First of all, my seat itself is the size of your grandpa’s favorite Lay-Z Boy.  There is enough legroom for my seat to extend and maneuver itself into a bed, without crushing my backpack.  Sarah Mofford, if you are reading this, you will understand when I say that this is more legroom than our room in Berkus has on a normal day.  Moreover, this chair IS A MASSAGE CHAIR.  I’m not kidding.  I’ve been taking advantage of this for literally hours.

                I thought these discoveries were pretty awesome, and I was all set to enjoy my fourteen hour massage, when the stewardess came and handed me a package of pajamas for my in-flight convenience.  They are white with red piping, neatly folded, the kind of pajamas I picture an adult wearing if he is playing a child in a musical.  Creepy, yet touching.  The stewardesses are all extremely neat and pretty, each one wearing an identical uniform of a patterned blouse with a high-waisted pencil skirt.  Their clothes are pressed, their hair is pulled back into flawless buns, and all of them take orders in clean, smooth voices, remaining distant but attentive.  It’s a little weird – I don’t feel like I could make jokes with them, and being served makes me uncomfortable – but you can tell they excel at what they do.  It’s kind of a crazy task – they have to be part hostess, part waitress, part maid, part nurse, part model.  They are polished and collected as they wait on passengers who are in two-day-old travel clothes and sleeping with their mouths open.  One of them seated me and a fellow passenger – also mysteriously bumped up to business – and took our drink orders immediately.  In my seat were an individually-wrapped blanket and a pillow.  The next few hours were filled with fun and games as my seatmate and I discovered all the joys of being a rich world traveler.  We each have a personal TV, for example, with countless of American, Hindi, and Arabic movies and shows.  The TV discovery led to the complementary pair of noise cancelling headphones discovery, which led to the discovery of multiple episodes of 30 Rock and Friends, which was interrupted by the discover that oh, in first class, THEY SERVE YOU A FOUR COURSE MEAL.  Not including the bread rolls.  The stewardess returned to give me and my seatmate hot white towels on plates that looked like sushi holders, then placed a linen napkin on my lap and a white table cloth on my tray table.  She called me madam.  I am not joking.

                So, drinking champagne – and no, it was not Andre – and watching Ross and Rachel go at it as my butt was synthetically massaged a mile above Texas, I concluded that my big international adventure has thus far been a success.  It does feel weird, though, to get so lucky this early.  The flight back to the U.S. in May certainly will be a challenge compared to rolling up to the MidEast in this hotel with wings.  Also, I feel like a definite imposter.  You can tell who’s a pro at first class (the portly people next to me who immediately ordered champagne and started complaining).   I, with my Kim Possible Pants and over-eager “Wow!” at each new piece of free merch, clearly don’t belong.  Also, while first class is super swanky and comfortable, it lacks my favorite part of traveling, which is the comraderie that develops between passengers on long trips.  I love these kinds of communities based on commiseration, that feeling of “your back hurts too?! Let’s be friends!”  that so often emerges from extended periods of unwanted physical contact with strangers.  Apparently such sentiments are only reserved for the proletariat.  I’m actually starting to feel a little jealous and isolated.  I’m picturing everyone behind the rich drapery playing board games and making fun of us business men up front. 

                Whatever.  I’m going to take business class as karmic payback for that virus I got on my computer during finals week, during which I also managed to sleep through the first half of my Heidegger final.  If this is how Karma is going to work out, all I can say is, India, here I come.