Settling In

Jaipur

The past few days have somehow managed to be both tedious and eventful. Our group made the move to Jaipur. For some reason, our itinerary demanded that we leave at 5:30am to make the four-hour journey. An extra hour was added to that journey when we stopped for an 8am tea break—totally necessary by Indian standards. When we arrived in Jaipur, we dropped our belongings off at the hotel, and continued on to the AIIS institute. The institute is at a brand new location, so it was exciting for every body to see it. We took lunch, had a very brief orientation (again), and than sat around for about 4 hours. Considering we’ve been awkwardly chatting with each other for the last few days, we’d been up since 5, and we were waiting to go visit our host families, waiting was torture.

Nevertheless, It’s all panned out. I’ve stayed two nights with my host family. They live in a middle-class neighborhood in a nice house. The house has a semi-open courtyard in the center and three stories built up in a square around it. The parents and their 13year old daughter live on the ground floor; the maid and paternal grandparents live on the second floor with me; and the two other AIIS girls live on the top floor. It’s a little weird to be a guest in the home of people you don’t really know at all. There are all these little social nuances that I don’t really pick up on, and anytime I need anything I have to ask one of my host parents. Even though they speak good English, communicating exactly what the issue is can be a little challenging. However, the daughter, Nicky, is really friendly. Last night we played Chinese checkers and tonight we just sat around and had a silly chat about music and TV.

Yesterday one of our professors explained the linguistic origins of Hindi. India is what scholars call a multi-lingual society, meaning that people speak more than one language on a daily basis. For example, One of my teachers speaks to her mother in lat in Gundrati, her husband in Hindi, and her son in English. There is also a fair bit of code swapping between languages. For example, a homestay parent once asked an AIIS student what the English word for “road” is. He had been using “road” his while life thinking it was a Hindi word. After the lecture, I felt both doomed and excited. Doomed, because what’s the point of learning Hindi when there are so many different dialects and even an Indian person needs several languages to get through her day. Excited, because Hindi is so perfectly phonetic that it can freely adopt any word, and, once I’m good with the language, it will be a fun language to express myself in. I’m not sure how all this will end up fitting in my life plan, but I do know that Hindi’s crazy and India’s crazy, so I’ll probably end up somewhere slightly crazy in the end.

Today was my first day of real classes at AIIS. Doing something other than eating and talking was very refreshing. So far, the teachers are really good at explaining the language and responding to our concerns. Hopefully these methods will continue for the rest of the summer.

I’m definitely still settling into India. I don’t love my room, and the homestay thing is still awkward. The sounds, smells, and people are overwhelming at times. And I’m not sure what I’ll do with myself once I have a free weekend. At the same time, I had a lot of these same feelings when I was in China, and I ended up loving it there.