First off, my favorite piece of Jaipur eye candy for the week:

For a Saturday, I’m feelin’ drained. Basically, today consisted of a jog that was really more of a three-mile hurdle, and a lunch party. Let me explain.

Something I’m wondering about Indian women: how do they exercise? Societal wardrobe constraints here make it awkward to do something like jog in anything but full body fabric coverage since “eve-teasing” (a delightfully Shakespearean term they say here for cat-calling) is at its peak really any time there are people on the street. Additionally, it gets really fucking hot here. So, I take it that if you’re into that sort of thing, you’ve gotta do it at the crack of dawn. I sort of came into this experience expecting these conditions. But having gotten next to no physical activity in the last 10 days, something had to be done. So, a friend from SIT who lives on my street and I decided to throw caution to the wind and run like nobody was watching.

Things that make it hard to jog in India:
• Sidewalks that end every eight feet
• Lack of real divide between motorized and pedestrian traffic
• Constant beration from street vendors to “try my juice!”

So I came home feeling good about my statement for female physicality (and my shirt didn’t even cover my tookus! Take that, oppressive cultural norms) and proceeded to try to clean myself up for lunch. Here’s where things get sticky. My shower is really a bucket of water that you heat up by dangling an electric metal rod in there for about 20 minutes or until its warm enough to pour on your body with a little cup. The trouble is, I forgot the city of Jaipur cuts all electricity between the hours of 10 and 11 am, thus eliminating the possibility of anything but frigid water. So, sticky I remained.

Then it was off to a temple in the surrounding hills of Jaipur with my host family for an Indian-style lunch party. But first, a word about my family. There’s a portrait in the dining room that contains my host father’s “immediate” family. There are 30 people in it. I asked him about it last night, which was a mistake because what followed was an exhaustive explanation of everyone, their spouse, their children, and their children’s children. A quiz came after that. I asked him how often they all see each other, to which he replied, “once or twice a month. Not very often.” Given that I haven’t seen my entire assembled extended family since I was 13, I’m beginning to feel like family connections are a little bit bigger of a deal here. Also, I just met a host sister I never knew I had, since she goes to a boarding school within Jaipur and only visit her grandparents (my mama and papa) every two weekends. She’s sassy and fantastic. We both like Bruno Mars.

One more thing about animal life in the city, since I can’t seem to get over it: on the way to the temple, I counted six camels involved in construction projects.

Once at the temple, Nimisha (my new sister) guided me through my first encounter with Hinduism. We took off our shoes and climbed the marble steps to a shrine of Ganesh (loosely resembling a blue elephant) and Hanuman (loosely resembling a man-monkey) to pray. Now, I’m the first to admit that I don’t know any real things about Hinduism, so I definitely felt weird about going through the motions of worship without having a clue what they meant. I did it anyway. First, we approached the front of a room with kneeling praying people and received a bright orange tika on our foreheads, a garland of carnations, and what I can only assume was rock candy. Then we rang one of the giant bells hanging from the ceiling. It made me think of a dentist I used to go to that had a similar bell for cavity-free patients to ring. It would also be the worst place in the world to have a hangover, since people are ringing them about every three seconds, and let’s just say they’re a little more abrasive than the playful tinkle of the one at the dentist. After that, we headed to the incense station towards the back to seal the deal and eat a pinch of ash. Mmm. I will say this: though I felt ridiculous and slightly disrespectful throughout the whole thing, the devotion with which actual Hindus around me were partaking in this ritual made an impression on me. Even before we left, my papa spent a good 20 minutes chanting/praying and making auspicious gestures towards various Hindu wall hangings around the house with a candle. I don’t get it, but I think I respect it.

Apparently at a good old-fashioned Indian lunch temple party doesn’t really get going for about two hours, so we took advantage of the time to wander around. This is when I had a moment of “this-is-one-of-the-most-beautiful-things-I’ve-ever-seen.” Since I of course didn’t bring a camera, I’ll try to paint you a mental picture. Next to the Ganesh-Haruman temple was another, more ornate temple. But this one was striking for its seeming lack of purpose. It was huge and beautifully carved of stone with layers and layers of balconies and pointed roofs. As a non-worshipper myself, I tend to have the bias towards seeing lavish churches and temples as a lot of time and intensive and meticulous construction for not the same amount of payoff. But this one, for whatever reason, sort of changed my mind. It was beautiful for beauty’ sake, and I like that that exists. Now for the mental picture part: as I was looking over a balcony from one wing of the temple to another, a loud bell rang at the same time as a strong gust of wind. This sent the hundreds of pigeons perched on the rooftops into a tizzy, and they all took off en masse from the temple to the sky, so many spots of blue-grey against the arid hills behind. Cool. Cool cool cool.

Since there’s no better way to process feelings than to eat something, lunch began! With all thirty or so of us seated on the floor at two long tables facing each other, the spiciest food I have thus far in my life encountered was served to each of us on leafy plates from metal buckets. Personal favorite: spicy bread roll with pomegranate seeds and a chunk of potato in the middle.

I love my 70-year old papa: on the car ride way home, he cranked the bass for a drum-heavy Gujarati jam. Rhythm’s the same in any culture.

After a cup of clove chai, all I could do was crash for a nap. Here are a few more events from this week that might have contributed to my exhaustion:

• Hindi class. We spend about 3 hours a day being bombarded with present tense, past tense, and a totally foreign grammar structure using words and characters that not only look nothing like English, they look remarkably like each other. On top of that, my host family does a really good job with speaking Hindi to me, but this means I’m constantly learning and forgetting key phrases that I haven’t yet made sense of.

• An anthropological visit to a basti (slum). Since my Hindi’s really bad, I didn’t realize where we were going until we got there. As part of this “field study” assignment, all of us Americans were supposed to walk single-file, not speak, notebooks in hand, and record everything we saw. Needless to say, that felt a little weird. What I saw surprised me in many ways. Nearly 15,000 people living in an area of about 2 acres produce a lot of waste, sewage and disease, sure, but they also form a very tight community. I went in expecting to feel guilty for all that I had and they didn’t, but found that everyone I encountered mostly wanted nothing more than a smile and a wave. Oh yeah, and we met a guy who’s lived there for 25 years making wooden puppets.

• Indian wedding! It’s wedding season in India, and love, actually, is all around. On our way to this one, we passed about five others and got stuck in a street while another horse-backed groom and his decadent posse engulfed the street on their way to pick up a bride.