still a sore spot....

As the readers of my blog will know, I got very sick during my semester abroad in India. I took a ton of antibiotics for a ton of illnesses and was even hospitalized for a few days with "a lot of bacteria." After coming back to the States, my primary physician told me that I actually probably contracted typhoid fever. This lead to a bunch of Typhoid Mary jokes. But no joke was funnier than the continuing one about that one time when I got bacterial dysentery. The other students on my program awarded me with, "Least Likely to Survive the Oregon Trail" at the end of the semester.

Imagine my surprise to find this event on the Internet --

That's right. Live-action Oregon Trail. An event that is using dysentery as a marketing tool is no friend of mine, let me tell you.

Don't do it. Dysentery sucks, and I'm speaking from experience.

i've been a bad, bad blogger

Sometime between my last post and now, I came back to America. I also wore a saree, and I looked damn fine. A few days later, I was back in Somerville to see my friends graduate from Tufts University. We all went out to celebrate not long afterwards. Guess which picture was taken in India and which one was taken in Massachusetts.

I've had some time to adjust to being back, and it's been wonderful. I don't care if I sound like a brat. I love having access to hot showers at any moment in the day and being able to drink the tap water whenever I want. I miss some things, but I've been missing the people on my program more than the place itself.

My wandering's not over, though. I'm headed on a road trip through the South this summer. There's few things that are more antithetical to India than the American South, and I'm so excited. Through Virginia and Tennessee to Oklahoma and then back through Arkansas for a music festival all the way up to Ohio to visit the boyfriend's parents and then back to Somerville.

Get ready to read a lot of blog posts about electronic music and pulled pork. You're welcome in advance.

in which i take lots of pictures with food

I blame the lack of blogging on my broken keyboard. The "U" key stopped working, which is problematic because my last name has a "U" in it and I need to type in my last name to log into my laptop. The quick fix to this problem was to go to the Apple store at the mall in Mumbai and get a keyboard. I figured this solution wold be more practical and less expensive than trying to find someone to fix it, especially since I'm leaving in a week. I basically paid $45 for a "U" key. It's like Wheel of Fortune: "Pat, I'd like to buy a vowel."

Despite the minor computer difficulties, I still finished my ISP with flying colors. Forty-seven pages later, and I'm done. It's been delivered to my teachers. I tried e-mailing it to them but the document was too big and the Internet was too slow, so I had to hand-deliver it via flash drive. I'm sitting in the program center in Delhi where we spent so much time over the past three and a half months. It's like coming back to school over the summer. The building's the same, but no one's really there anymore so it feels a little bit weird.

Let's play, "Find the American at the airport in Mumabi."

Coming back to Delhi generally just feels strange. Part of that could do with the sleep deprivation though. Sarah and I left Mumbai on a 6AM flight yesterday, which required us to leave our friend's apartment at 3AM. We also decided that the only way we wouldn't miss our flight is if we pulled an all-nighter. This made for an interesting time at the airport, which included many donuts and lots of naps.

But we still managed to do a lot yesterday. In case you were worried, let me tell you: Delhi's still here, and it's still Delhi. We ran a lot of errands yesterday including three to the same tailor, one to a different tailor and one crucial trip to Dunkin' Donuts. You read that right. Dunkin' Donuts just opened its first store in GK-I, and it's three-stories tall. Without doubt the nicest Dunkin' I've ever been to.

Sitting in Dunkin' yesterday made me miss Boston (because Dunkin' Donuts was founded in Quincy and there are four Dunkin' Donuts within walking distance of my house at Tufts). I'll be home this time next week, and I'm very ready to go back to America. I'm sure there are things that I will miss about being here in India, but it's hard to know what that will be since I'm still very much in the thick of it. We're hopping on a train tonight to go to Mussorie for our final ISP presentations, and I'm looking forward to hearing about how everyone else spent the last month. I think it's also supposed to be some sort of decompression period or reorientation or something, so hopefully we'll also have some downtime to reflect about what these experiences have meant because I definitely need to do some of that self-reflection stuff. If nothing else, I'm excited to wear my newly purchased saree for our banquet on Sunday night.

Happiest of them all.

I know the next six days will fly by and I need to savor them as much as I can rather than try to rush it along to get on that last flight home but that can be hard when the Indian Dunkin' Donuts is teasing you with Dunkin' Cold Coffees that have the consistency of a Slushie but they are so close to the exact flavor of a Dunkin' Iced Regular that if you just close your eyes, you can sort of imagine that it's summertime and you're sipping your morning Dunkin' Iced Regular on the porch of your house to get your day started but then you open your eyes and you're still in India and it's slightly crushing. (Can you tell that I'm homesick?)

in which i muse about mumbai

I'm currently sitting in Leopold's Cafe, a staple of the Mumbai scene, with Sarah. I'm sitting in the air conditioned bar upstairs because we wanted to see the bullet marks left by the terrorist attack on this place in 2008, and we'll be working on our ISPs during lunch and for the next few hours. I'll probably order a draught beer in a little bit, and I might go for the fish and chips.

This is a pretty good indicator of how I've been spending my time these days. It's been full of good food, good people and a new city. Mumbai is wonderful, and it's even more wonderful to be here with friends from the program. It's a nice mix of relaxation, of touring, of schoolwork. A friend from Tufts came from Pune on Tuesday, and we went biking in the national park in the north of the city. Last night was a friend's 21st birthday, so we went to a restaurant that looked like Mars 2112 but classier, like the dinner lounge of the future. Yesterday, we were approached by a Bollywood casting agent who was looking for "European-looking" girls to be extras in a film, and we might go tomorrow.

The British influence here is palpable. It sounds a little naïve, but I occasionally forgot that India was dominated by the British in Delhi. It's hard to tell unless you're in certain parts of the city because the buildings are all very boxy. Here, the architecture is unmistakably European. The train stations look like the ones I've travelled through in France and in England, with broad arches and stone details.

Moral of the story is that I like this city, but I'm still very ready to go home. This time in two weeks, I expect to be nomming on a bagel from the Bagel Emporium while watching the episodes of "30 Rock" that I know have been recorded on our DVR. (Take notes, Mom and Dad. If you meet me at the airport with a plain bagel with chive cream cheese, I might break down and cry with tears of joy.) It's nice to be wrapping up this program on a high note though, and I think it can only get better over the next two weeks. I just need to finish this paper.

bombay dreams

Back in the day, I saw that Broadway musical called "Bombay Dreams." The only song I remember goes along the lines of, "Salaam Bombay! Salaam Bom-bayy!" It was delightfully tacky, and it was about slums but it was on Broadway so it wasn't exactly authentic. That's about the extent to what I know about Mumbai though.

But here I am, in Mumbai. I got here on Saturday after a quick plane ride from Delhi on India's version of JetBlue -- Indigo Airlines. The woman sitting next to me was in full salwar kameez, probably no older than my own mother, but she didn't know how to buckle and unbuckle her seat belt. It was a really foreign thing to her.

The thing that was most foreign to me was loading and unloading the plane. We had to take a bus to the tarmac and then climb the stairs to the plane, which is something that I've done before but still not used to but never fails to make me feel glamorous or the Secretary of State.

I hopped in a cab to go to the YMCA International Center, which is the bomb. The room is clean and there's a hot shower and a big window. Breakfast and dinner are included, and the omelets are to die for. There's also coffee, and the coffee doesn't suck. Mumbai is the best, too. It's beautiful, and there's a lovely coast. I'm so excited to walk around on Marine Drive, along the Arabian Sea.

The best part of being here is reuniting with friends here. I met up with friends from my program on Saturday, and we went to an event at the race track. It was an awards ceremony of some kind for horses, but there was a fashion show involved and some magic tricks. We went to a club afterwards, which was a goofy scene. The next day, I woke up relatively early and went to the Mumbai Gallery of Modern Art, which was having an exhibit about urban planning in Mumbai! It was awesome. Did you know the average New Yorker gets 26 square meters of open space, while a Mumbai resident gets only 1 square meter? That's crazy. I nerded out hard there and then met up with my friend at his country club.

I didn't do much sightseeing yesterday because my friends are coming up from Jamkhed today, and I wanted to wait to do that until they're here. I don't know what I'm going to do today, but it'll probably involve meeting up with people, which is a wonderful thing to say. I'm sorry this is a lot of text and not a lot of photographs, but it's been a few days and I've done a lot of things. It's the beginning of the end -- only fifteen days left before the flight home and I want to make as much of this experience as I can, even if I'm ready to pack up and leave.