I'm in India. India is not Egypt.

A rather obvious statement but one I have to regularly remind myself of. So much of what I see every day here reminds me so much of Egypt, but I have to remind myself that it is not Egypt. I keep bringing up stories about Egypt or relating things I see here to things I've seen in Egypt and then I just have to take a step back and remind myself that the other students on this trip haven't been to Egypt and have no interest in Egypt.

There are many ways in which India is similar to Egypt and many more in which it is not. Let me start with traffic. Like Egypt, India has a lot of it. I've only been to Bangalore so far, but the streets are packed there. They are not quite as packed as the streets of Cairo, but it is still pretty hectic. Unlike Egypt, a large percentage of the vehicles on the road are 3-wheeled auto rickshaws. These are the same things as Egyptian "tuk-tuks", but in Egypt, tuk-tuks aren't allowed on main streets, so they are not seen very often. Here in India, auto rickshaws are the primary form of taxi transport. If you want to ride in a car taxi, you have to call it and have it come to you.

We recently came back from weekend homestay experiences. I was staying with a Muslim family, and I was struck by how similar their house and life were to the houses and lives of Muslim families I've seen in Egypt. The walls of the house were adorned with Quranic verses. The kitchen looked similar. The living room looked similar. The bathroom looked very similar (complete with the lack of shower curtain). Even the beds had a similar hard feel to them. The hospitality of the host family was at once tremendous and overwhelming as I have often found to be the case in Egypt. No matter how much I ate, my generous hosts insisted I was eating "too less". Familiar...

There was a 17-year old girl in my host home named Shifa. She is incredibly nice. She is in her first year of medical school, and, when I first saw her, she had just come from classes. She carried a large white purse with her books, notebooks and pens inside and her cell phone was glued to her hand. It reminded me very much of the students at the AUC last year. Speaking of cell phones, people give them such priority here! They are constantly ringing during class/presentations and people are not at all embarassed to answer them and carry out conversations. This was something I had noticed in Egypt as well. I wonder if it is because in both India and Egypt (and many other countries that aren't the US), only the sender and not the receiver of a telephone call pays for the call. This means that answering the phone when it rings rather than letting yourself miss the call and then calling back later equals saving money.

There are Hindu temples all around Bangalore (obviously since India is 80% Hindu). I had never seen a Hindu temple before, and I am awed by how decorative they are. They all are adorned with little statues of many of the Hindu gods and goddesses. They are a marvel to look at and unlike any place of worship I have seen before.

One thing that I've noticed here that is very different from Cairo is that men do not talk/hiss/shout/stare at women who walk past them on the street. In Cairo, no matter what you a woman wears, she gets a lot of attention from males if she is walking alone. Although we had been told that this was the case in India during our orientation, I haven't found that to be true at all. Perhaps it is true in other cities but not Bangalore. Even as a group of Americans who clearly stands out, we haven't been bothered by men on the streets at all. That reminds me! A large part of why we, particularly the women, stand out is that we don't wear salwar kameez or saris. I'd say about 95% of the women wear one of those two clothing items. Some of us got the chance to buy similar things this weekend with our host families, and I think all of us are hoping to buy at least one Indian outfit soon. Men tend to wear clothing similar to what men wear in the US. They also sometimes wear a kurta, but kurtas are not nearly as common as salwar kameez and saris.

I am staying on the campus of and NGO called Visthar. It is an absolutely beautiful campus full of all sorts of greenery, including many fruit trees! The campus is also home to about 70 girls who attend the Bandhavi school. Had they not been taken from their homes to attend the school, they would have eventually become temple prostitutes. They have all been here for a few years now, and it is clear that they absolutely love it here. The food at Visthar is great! It is currently Ramadan, so I haven't gotten to eat much of it, but what I have eaten is delicious. Our classes take place on campus. So far, our classes have been long and seemingly pointless. It feels sort of like an extended college orientation. We are, though, still in the section of our syllabus called Orientation. I am sure that as things get going, it will be more intense.

So far we have gone on our homestays, been welcomed to Visthar and India in an elaborate inaugural celebration, been invited to participate in the games and feast involved in Visthar's celebration of the festival Onam, toured a slum and an elite mall in Bangalore, been tasked with finding our way by bus to St. Mary's Basilica in Bangalore to celebrate the festival that revolves around the birthday of the virgin Mary, watched a play by the Indian theatre group 'Rafiki' about South African apartheid, and spent many hours in a classroom talking about how we can build community at Visthar.

It has been fun, but I am missing home greatly. I keep reminding myself that I am in India, so I should really be living in the moment and enjoying every moment of it. It is hard, but I think it will get easier as time goes on.

I currently have a mosquito bite on my eyelid and one on my lip, so it looks like I got in a fight. I also have little bug bites all over my forehead and the sides of my cheeks. I'm hoping they don't swell because then I'll really look strange.

Oo...I just thought of some other things to mention. My host family to me to get Mahindi (Henna) on my hands. It was only 25 rupees per hand (50 cents). They also bought me some bangles and a beautiful Indian scarf. It was pretty amazing.

Also, we started yoga classes yesterday. So far, we really haven't done much yoga. The instructor talks about yoga theory/history for most of the class and then yesterday we did stretching exercises and today we did breathing exercises. He said we will start doing poses tomorrow.

Okay, this may be the most scattered blog post (or any piece of writing for that matter) that I have ever written. Sorry about that, but there is a lot of things that I would like to be able to write, and I kinda just wrote things down as they came to mind. Hopefully my next blog post will be at least marginally more coherent.