Emily's boring life

I feel like I haven't written anything in a while, so it's time for another entry. But, the problem is, life has finally settled down and I have less interesting things to say. So, here's some snippets of what I do every day here.

1) Classes. These are great, especially now that scheduling has stopped and everything is set in stone (although my roommate just had her professor come up to her and ask if it was okay if her class met on Saturday mornings...umm, no?). I'm taking:
- Basic Hindi: All I can say is that at least the Greek letters are somewhat familiar, and there aren't 44 of them. But there's only four people in my class, which is nice.
- Women Writing, Writing Women: A seminar class based around women's literature. We all basically get to pick our own texts to present, and then have a class based discussion around it. Also, apparently the professor knows Paula Richman, my Hinduism professor back at Oberlin. It's a really small class, about half Americans and half Indians, which gives a really interesting perspective on all of the women's views we discuss.
- Children's Literature: My homework is to read a different kid's book every week. It's great. A lot of them are really random books that I didn't realize that anyone else had ever read...like Green Knowe and What Katy Did. Right now we're reading fairy tales...I never realized how depressing the original "Little Mermaid" is! She dies and turns into sea foam because she doesn't have a soul. Seriously? Also, I'm the only American in the class, which is fun. There's only 5 of us, so we all cram into the professor's little tiny office and do things like watch horrible BBC adaptations of "The Snow Queen."
- Indian Philosophy: This is probably my least favorite class. It's a two hour lecture on philosophy. Which could be really interesting, after all, I'm a religion major, but the professor is really boring and manages to not really say anything in 2 hours and he's pretty hard to understand and last class I managed to get spit on by him constantly. It makes me miss David Kamitsuka and MRT.

2) People. The people here are amazing. I've made a lot of friends, and one of my favorite things to do is hang out on the balcony in the evenings. We bring out a guitar and hold sing-a-longs, or we just sit out there and talk for hours. Also, there's always someone to go on adventures with. Which leads me to my next topic...

3) Travel. I haven't gotten the chance to do this yet. We were planning a trip for this weekend, but we couldn't get train tickets because it's a holiday and everyone is traveling. So we pushed that trip back and now I'm in the midst of planning two trips...one to Hampi (the home of Hanuman and the monkey people in the Ramayana), and the other to Gokarna (think hippies and beaches). It's great how easy it is to travel here...we paid 30$ for 11 hour, round trip train tickets in kind of the equivalent to business class, and we're expecting to pay about 4$ a night, if that, for our hotels while we're there.

All in all, I'm quite enjoying myself here. There are definitely the downsides, like the fact that getting to and from anywhere involves biking up the huge hill of doom, and the fact that I keep getting ripped off by rickshaw drivers (hint: if you don't want to get cheated quite as badly, go with a guy). However, there are now hot showers in the dorms, I'm actually getting muscles in my legs, and even the heat doesn't really bother me...in fact, this is the perfect climate (talk to me again in April...I might have changed my mind).

Maybe soon I'll have something more exciting to tell y'all.