First week of Hindi lessons...done!

We just finished our first week of Hindi lessons at Landour Language School in Mussoorie. And I have to say...when they say intensive language program, they mean intensive. It's amazing how fast we're learning. We spend 4 hours a day in class, and then have several more hours of homework a night, usually. I don't mind, though - I think it's a lot of fun to learn a new language, and Hindi is surprisingly intuitive. We know most of the alphabet now, which means we can read most Hindi words without a problem, since Hindi is totally phonetic. Last night while I was doing my homework, it hit me that I was writing full sentences in what was indecipherable gibberish to me only 4 days earlier. A lot of people are feeling overwhelmed because we're moving so fast, but I love it! I think I'm going to get an outside tutor for conversational Hindi, too. Oh, that reminds me: one of my little factoids from an earlier post was misinformed. One of the other EAP students told me that there is no Hindi word for "thank you," but that is entirely false. The Hindi word for "thank you" is dhanyawad.

In other news, I downgraded myself to mostly vegan this week. There are two main reasons for this:
1. Where we're staying in Mussoorie, we don't really have access to a kitchen or anything, so we can't prepare our own food. Being here is a bit of a stressful adjustment (although I feel pretty well adjusted at this point), and being able to eat hardly anything was making it a lot more difficult.
2. The main reason I abstained from dairy products in the US was for reasons relating to the farming practices involved in their production. As far as I can tell from what I've seen and the research I've done, people treat cows a lot better here.

That said, this has also made me realize that being vegan isn't that much of a choice anymore. I am totally disgusted by the taste of milk/cheese/butter (especially butter!), so in anything non-vegan I eat, the taste has to be pretty well disguised. That means I'm pretty much limited to some cookies, pancakes without butter, occasional chocolate, etc. But even having that can help make things seem a little less stressful - I never realized how much sweets can really make me feel better when I'm having a bad day. Call me an emotional eater I guess. Anyway, I will probably be going back to full vegan again once we get back to Delhi and can prepare our own food - I feel more comfortable when I'm eating totally vegan.

Jordan and I are going to do something cool this weekend. Until now, we had our mind set on heading out to the Hindu holy city of Haridwar on Saturday, spending the night in an ashram there and going to Rishikesh (the self-styled yoga and meditation capital of the world - the Beatles wrote most of the White Album while staying in an ashram there) on Sunday, then heading back Sunday night. BUT, we just got invited to a Sikh wedding tomorrow. So, we might go to that instead. We'll have to ponder it and figure out tonight what our plans are. Either way, I'm sure we'll have lots to report.

Also, I just got my sari back from the tailor, and it is amazing. I have no business wearing something so beautiful! Jordan's first reaction when he saw me was to say, "aap sunder hain," which means, "you are beautiful." (I just had to mention that.) There will be pictures of me in a sari with the next blog update. Speaking of pictures, here are some new ones:



Every day on our way to school, we go past this point where there is a little valley between two peaks. On days when the clouds are low (which happens pretty often), we see them rolling through the valley like this.



Jordan just got this kurta pajama (that's what these suits are called) tailored. Including fabric, tailoring and everything, it only cost him Rs. 350 (about $7 US)!! He bought that snazzy cane here too.



We saw these boys playing cricket on the street in Landour, which is about a 10 minute walk down the hill from our hotel.

There are a couple more new pictures up on our Flickr photostream too.