This has been a great week! I'm going to share a couple highlights with everyone!
Monday night we went to a village called Pollachi where we observed the Hindu celebration of Pongol! It is one of the biggest celebrations in the Indian State of Tamil Nadu (the state Coimbatore is in). From my understanding it is basically a celebration of thanksgiving towards the cows, which are very sacred in Hindu culture. We went to a house of a family who graciously had us over for this celebration and prepared dinner for us.
This is a picture of the "altar" type thing for the celebration. There were many rituals around this alter. It was very interesting, but a little sad to see them idolize these gods and the cows.
Oh, and here is a picture of some of the Indian children I'm going to kidnap. They are seriously so cute, and they didn’t speak much English so that made them even cuter. They key to getting Indian kids to hang out with you is asking if you can take their picture, then showing it to them on the camera. Then they want to start taking the pictures themselves, which is fun. Then you realize a Pongol celebration is going on and you should probably stop distracting the kids . . .
We started class on Monday! Our scheduling here is different from in America; we don’t really have a set schedule of when classes are. We will typically find out our schedule at the beginning of the week, but can change. The classes I’ve had so far are Religious Landscape, Business in an Indian Perspective, and Social Work. I’ve also been to the site of my internship, but I don’t really know enough about that to write about it, so I’ll share more details later. I like the classes so far, and all the professors are really nice and knowledgeable. My favorite part about my Religious Landscape class is that since it is three hours long, we had a tea break in the middle of it!
Here is the traditional “First Day of School” picture! This is one of my new outfits I bought shopping last weekend. I really love the colors here!
As I’ve said before, a lot of the meals here consist of rice with different sauces. I try not to complain a lot, but after just a week I’m getting a little tired of rice! I know these feelings will come and go, so I’m thankful that we have a kitchen where I can make something non-Indian for myself! Tonight I made an American Classic – grilled cheese sandwiches!
Also, Thursday in our apartment we randomly picked up a wireless internet signal! We felt very American by being so excited about this, but it was nice to be able to have it without going to the internet café. And the timing couldn’t have been more perfect, it was around 7-7:30 AM Oklahoma time, so I got to interrupt my parents as they were getting ready for work to skype with them for the first time since I’ve been here! It was a nice surprise for all of us!
Probably the most exciting story of the week comes from our director, Kirk. He was in his kitchen one morning and turns around to see a monkey sitting in his apartment! It came in through the open balcony door. I’ve yet to see one (they are very rare in the city, Kirk says it’s the first time he’s seen one in Coimbatore), but apparently they aren’t like the cute monkeys we see at the zoo! He scared it out of his apartment before it decided to do anything too dangerous.
I’m going to leave you all with this picture I took the other night from the roof of our apartment during sunset! It cost me a couple mosquito bites, but was totally worth it!
This weekend we are going on a trip to Madurai, India! I will definitely be sharing this adventure with you all very soon!
Right now all the students and a few of the staff are in our apartment having a pasta dinner! Its turning out to be one of my favorite nights here so far :)
Hope everyone is having a good week!! Thanks again for reading this!
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