Thursday, July 13 Oh, the monotony

Today I packed up and left early by bus for Nepal to go to Mount Everest Base Camp at 15,000 feet. Hahaha, yeah right. Instead, this is what I do. The routine hasn’t changed once in the last three weeks. I get up at 7:30 and get dressed. Getting dressed means putting on the same thing I’ve worn for the past four days without showering (if you must know it’s my acid-wash jeans, electric blue fleece, and matching electric blue sandals, and a medusa-like hairdo from lack of shampoo). I walk down the hill to go to breakfast at Dev Dar. Then I went to four hours of Hindi class. The first teacher, Joshi, comes 15 minutes late every day so we don’t end up starting class until 8:35. Then Habib, who uses a Gelly Roll and has a love letter written on the cover of his textbook, Afro-picks his hair while quizzing us, and when class gets out he runs to go play ping-pong. Then there comes the unnecessarily long chai break. The third teacher, who we call Teacher #3 because we don’t know her name (even though she knows mine and thinks I’m a good student because I come early and finish my homework I was supposed to do last night), teaches grammar while time actually STOPS. Then Taslim, the fourth, is a good teacher and when we tell him we’re tired, he goes, “Well, you should sleep more.” I love the language barrier. In classes we learned fifty new vocab words and move at lightning speed in dictation, comprehension, reading, and grammar. It’s ridiculously hard and fast. So, the classes go by fast…and by “fast”, I mean excruciatingly slow. We have to wait in the pews of the church between classes because the last one is in the BELL TOWER. I love separation of church and state. When it’s over, lunch is out. Every day without fail, we have dal and chapatis and rice for lunch. Then it rains and my umbrella has four holes and three of the spokes are sticking out, so I don’t even get the point. And my green backpack I have taken all over the world is disintegrating and now has a huge hole right in the front, plus the fabric comes out of stitch and gets stuck in the zipper. Shivani’s starting a fund to buy me some un-ghetto stuff. It’s not like I can’t afford new stuff; I just choose to spend the 100R I have at the time on banana pancakes and the internet. Besides that, the afternoons and evenings are spent squandered, doing nothing the rest of the day. I feel sick to my stomach every day, it’s never normal. Then there’s dinner, which is weird. I always end up eating a ton (not like that’s anything new but I’m never satiated here). We’ve decided it’s because I have a tapeworm in my large intestine, whom we named George. Then I usually study Hindi (for 15 minutes before complaining and giving up) and walk back home using the flashlight on my Nokia (obviously designed for the Third World). And this is what I do EVERY day here in Mussoorie. It’s getting so boring and routine, and I get cabin fever every day. The only thing to do is study Hindi, be sick, spend money, eat, and wait to eat. But, on a good day you might get lucky and get to watch an American movie, go online, gossip, and attend Oakland parties. We’re so bored here that conversation has been fully exhausted. We have nothing left to talk about…except gossip and food. Everyone is getting or has gotten sick, including Ajay, Eleyce (who has a stomach bacteria that won’t die and has been hospitalized for the last four days), Nikhil, Rohit (both of them), Shannon, Mariel, Kim, Daniel, Joslyn, Maia, Erica, and me. And a bunch of people have been getting really homesick and even started crying in class or on the phone with parents. I think because there’s nothing else to do. Other parents (mostly girls’ parents) get sad, too. Then there’s my parents; who don’t answer the phone when I call, condoned coming back after the holidays because the flights were cheaper, and who claim I have to pay for everything (but then I check my bank account and there’s a random $500 deposit). But I’m glad they’re like that because I have freedom to do whatever I want and they don’t care as long as I’m happy here. I’m getting homesick, but it fades in and out. I actually can’t wait to go back to Delhi at this point. If I could choose one word to exemplify the Mussoorie experience, it would most definitely be “ughhhh”. :)