SCREW BLOGGER.

I have withstood your failures for the last time.
So, enjoy my new blog at:

http://christineindia.tumblr.com/

Indian Thoughts

Some random thoughts from the last few days:

• If the theatre department here has a motto/mission statement, it is probably "Hey, let's see how much of this American girl's time we can waste?!"
• Classroom debates here get so much more heated so much quicker than in the US. People were legit shouting other people down during my English class.
• Who knew IPA would come in handy? But it has been, with learning Hindi. It makes understanding a phonetic language with a whole different alphabet a lot easier. Also having fun writing my friends' names in Hindi script ^.^
  
• WHY IS IT SO HOT? Edit: Thank god it just started raining. Maybe it will not be so terribly heat-wavey.
  
• Who knew rickshaws could get pulled over? The one I was riding in did.
• Kathak dance is fun, but hurts my feet, because apparently a key task in it is "Slam your feet on the ground as hard as possible." Also, my ability to zone out and completely mess up a very simple step is rather remarkable.
• Sitar is hard... there was no part of my body that did not hurt after my first hour long lesson. But I'm pretty sure I looked bad-ass playing.

See, Badass. Yeah, look at me playing that one scale I know. looking grungy with my glasses.

Sorry.

I AM A TERRIBLE BLOGGER.

I have never been the journal keeping type - strange for someone who loves writing and reading, I know. But truthfully, I enjoy reading blogs more than I enjoy keeping them. And even whilst having adventures and new experiences that I like telling people about and taking pictures of, instead of writing about them immediately, I am storing them away as ideas for future writing. Truly, I have at least twenty ideas, for both fiction and blogging, fermenting in my head right now, that I haven't put to paper because my head doesn't work that quickly. It needs time to ponder what I'm doing before writing about it. If I don't, I feel as though my posts are long winded rants that meander and make no sense to anyone. Which is what makes me a TERRIBLE BLOGGER.
So I am sorry about the long stretches of time between posts. I will try harder to make my brain work better.
For now, here's an idea that has come to the forefront of my mind rather quickly. It's a list though, and those do pop up to me faster than actual entries do.

Things That Have Happened at My Indian University That Would Not Happen in My American One.

1. A professor saying "Well, if you go to Europe, and you go to America, Europe is really just so much more civilized. They are more civilized and have more culture. The Germans most of all. 'Culture' is a Germanic word, and no other civilization at the time had a word for culture. Which is why the Germans are the most civilized."
2. "The French are also very good. Very warm people."
3. Professors end class 10 minutes late and start ten minutes early. Especially when you've just had another class right before that started ten minutes early and ended ten minutes late. And the average travel time to class is 15 minutes.
   
4. "Oh, our classes don't start Until August 1st. Yes, I know the rest of the University started on July 19th. Ours don't"
5. "Also, your professor is in Colombia until August 10th. So your classes don't start until then. Even though you have to be registered by the 1st and don't know if you can even get into the class."
6. The bus is supposed to come at 10:50 and get to the Social Sciences building by 11, for your class at that time. Instead, the bus comes at 11:10 and gets to the Social Sciences building at 11:25, which is when you get there anyway by walking.
   
7. Also, your teacher locks the door at 11:20 because the monsoon-force wind bangs the door open and shut every thirty seconds
8. The power goes out 4 times in a class period and no one says a word. Or even flinches.
9. Despite the loud annoying beeping noise and the fact that now without power to the fans your classroom temperature can best be described as "standing at the gates of hell"
10. 'Syllabus Day' is actually 'Two Hour Lecture on Medieval Feudalism and Oh, You'll Get the Syllabus Eventually" day.

BUT, Despite the frequent blackouts and alternating monsoon/surface of the sun weather, the annoying scheduling of classes and buses, and overall ineffectiveness of trying to schedule anything, I am thoroughly enjoying it here. Without the ability to schedule, I went through three stages of attempting to conquer my control freak nature:

• Frustration
• Utter hopelessness
  
• Relaxation

Not to say I still don't get frustrated and sometimes feel so helpless about everything not working that I want to cry, but it has gotten much better. And with long stretches of time without anything to do (Waiting 2 hours for a taxi! Long walks/bike rides to other parts of campus! No class on Fridays!) I am experiencing less structure and stress than normal. And while this led to panic attacks last year, I think having the ability to chalk all this craziness up to India makes me feel a lot better about it.

So, to illustrate this - guess what I did today? Slept until noon, ate a lovely Indian lunch with too many carbs, read blogs until 4 and at "tea time" (best invention ever, by the way) had 4 cups of chai while discussing comic books and movies and poetry and books, then watched videos of Mary Roach interviews, ate dinner and now am writing this blog while waiting for more videos of movies I want to watch (An Education again, A Single Man and Revolutionary Road) to upload. All in all, thoroughly unproductive by my standards. And I felt awesome about it.
And anyway, how could I not when I just got to spend half an hour running around the common room playing with Tanvi:

Adorable!

So that's all I will write for now, that's all I had stored away in my head. At this point it will become random musings and indecipherable rants. And no one wants that. So I'll write on my trip to Bangalore and the other things I have been up to later. Hopefully soon.
Thank you for sticking around with me, despite my terrible journal keeping habits.