Happy New Year!

A festive kolam, a rice flour design drawn by Hindi women in South India outside of their homes, just beyond the south gate of campus.

New Year's celebrations are very big in India, though everyone seems to get dressed up to celebrate on January 1 rather than December 31. I celebrated New Year's with my new friends in my program at an incredibly elegant restaurant called "Our Place." We entered the restaurant through a marble-laid corridor filled with artwork, but then the restaurant just opened up into the night air.  The entire seating section was open air, with tables framed  palm trees, whose leaves also made a more secluded balcony seating.  The best part of the atmosphere, however, was created by the continuous live traditional music featuring sitar, tabla, and bamboo flutes. The evening was incomparable-- I celebrated the New Year with a great group of people while listening to beautiful music in INDIA! It's pretty hard to beat.

The new year has also ushered in new experiences with Indian transportation, which I am continually amazed by. For starters, the Indian approach to walking is drastically different than the equivalent American opinion. Campus is approximately 2,300 acres of mostly forest, with the international dorm located on the south end.  The main campus where the different academic buildings are located is a brisk 30 minute walk from where I’m currently living, though longer if you walk at the more leisurely Indian pace.  “Shop-Com,” the small commercial area on campus where there’s a ATM and a couple of small stores which sell your basic notebooks, soda, and the like, is also about 30 minutes away and is located just before you reach Main Gate, where you exit campus to get onto a city road.  Everything in campus is apparently entirely walkable, though many of the Indian students have bikes or motor- scooters. It makes Dickinson seem absolutely tiny, and any reservations I had about a building being too far away seem ridiculous.

I've also had new adventures with the public buses and the  ubiquitous "auto" or Indian rickshaw. An Indian student, Anita, helped a group of us Americans attempt to understand the bus system on Sunday. We boarded the M216 bus outside of the Main Gate, headed toward Mehdipatnam, a major bus hub and shopping area. Generally on Indian buses, women enter at the front of the bus while men get on towards the back. Once you’re on you wait for the conductor to approach you and you pay a different price based on where you’re going.  We were staying on the bus to its last stop, which cost Rs. 9, the equivalent of about 20 cents.  Indian buses also have seating designations.  About the front half of the bus has seating for women, and is labeled “Ladies” on the corresponding bus sides above the windows. Anita had Lindsey, a girl in my program, gain a seat by asking a man to move because he was seating in a “Ladies” seat, which he automatically did. Maybe better seating on the bus is one benefit of this pseudo-chauvinistic society?

Today a small group of us took a rickshaw to go explore Lingampally, a nearby town. We bargained the driver down to Rs. 60 for the 5 of us, which seemed reasonable since it was going to be at least a 20 minute ride. In ended up taking about double that because we were stopped at a train crossing for a good 15 minutes, which provided an excellent opportunity for some pictures:

Some new friends

The view out our driver's windshield

The modern Indian woman