Hey everyone,
I'm writing this as I sit in my apartment in Mumbai. It is currently 3:30 am and I cant remember ever feeling more awake. I arrived today at around 5 pm and unfortunately, my stupid internal clock still thinks I'm in California or something where it is 3 pm.
Since this is my first blog post, I guess I'll start from when I left California, almost two weeks ago at this point. But I'll speed it up:
- I have the most amazing friends, who all came to my house the day I left to help me pack and send me off. They rock and here's a picture of us:
- Orientation in New York was a whirlwind. I have about 25 fellow fellows, each more qualified and friendly as the next. Everyone has interesting stories of how they got here and different goals for this year; it's a real mix. I feel very young and inexperienced in comparison to many of the others, but I keep reminding myself that I'm here for a reason and that I do, in fact, have experience (though I do not have experience swerving around cows in the middle of a city street, which is something we do here).
- I got my first taste of Indian bureaucracy and did not get my visa in time to leave on my original flight (and I swear it was not for lack of trying. I know this is the kind of thing that usually really is my fault; it really, really wasn't this time!). So while I waited around for the pretty sticker in my passport to arrive, I decided to take advantage of the fact that I was on the East Coast and visit friendsies! I hopped on a bus to Boston, stayed with Emily for a night and helped Hannah move into her new Harvard Grad School apartment.
- Back in New York for less than 24 hours, I said my goodbyes, picked up my passport, ate my last biscuit for what I assume will be a while (thanks, Micah), and went to Newark for my 15-hour flight to Mumbai.
- Despite my TV and sound system being broken resulting in no in-flight entertainment, and the fact that they served white bread with plastic cheese and mayonnaise for "lunch," the flight was not bad. Every time I woke up, I would tell myself it had only been a couple of hours so I was very surprised when we were suddenly descending (especially because in my dream the plane had just landed in Cuba to refill the engines and the passengers had voted to spend a few days there instead of continuing on to Mumbai immediately).
- Tahl, a fellow Middkid a few years my senior and the current JSC fellow; Elijah, the director of the JDC in Mumbai; and Kimberly, the other fellow who will be in Mumbai with me this year, met me at the airport. There is lots of color here and even the paper towels in the airport restrooms were green! There are swarms of people in every direction, highrise buildings of stone, shacks of corrugated metal, lean-tos of sticks and twine, tarps as far as the eye can see. On the roads there are cars with personal drivers (one of which I was in), taxis, rickshaws, motorcycles, bicycles, schoolchildren in colorful uniforms and adorable braids, people in rags sifting through piles of trash, women in saris chatting, men in tank tops waiting in street-side market shacks, and traffic. There are no rules of the road, and no traffic lanes as far as I can tell. People go where they need to go when they want to go there, regardless of what other people or animals or vehicles are doing.
- My apartment is really Kimberly's apartment. She's been here a couple days already and has made it feel like home. The past fellows left many useful things, including a lifetime supply of wet wipes, a mini pharmacy, dishes, linens, and a bookcase full of Lonely Planets guides, etc. The apartment is very nice and very funky. My favorite part is the shower (duh), which is just a shower head in the bathroom, meaning you have to squeegee the whole floor to a drain in the corner near the toilet. I will be moving to an apartment in Thane sometime in the next month or two so that I can be near the GPM fellows when my first group arrives in October.
- We ordered in food for dinner and it was ridiculously cheap. For both of us with leftovers it was 290 rupees, which is about $4.26. I have no idea what we ordered and neither does Kimberly, other than the fact that one of them had paneer and everything was plate-licking good. There was also some weird spicy pickled cherry tomato thing that I need to learn the name of.
- Tomorrow I will go see the JDC offices and meet everyone there, then Tahl will take Kimberly and me to Thane to see where I will be. It will be my first time on the train here, and I've heard it's really a trip. Also, there will be a festival throughout Mumbai where two or three buildings hang a bottle with money between them and teams of about 40 people in brightly colored matching shirts come into town and go around to all the bottles trying to break them. They build giant, giant human pyramids with big guys at the bottom and small childrem at the top and people fall and injure themselves but everyone is happy and celebrating and snacking.
That's about it for now! I'll try to update this blog somewhat regularly, but feel free to email me (leahlrobinson@gmail.com) or Facebook me whenever! I'm still not exactly sure what the Internet situation will be, but I'll respond when I can.
With as much love as naan is delicious,
Leah
