49 days, 23 hours, 34 minutes...

...until my plane home lands in Minneapolis. Meaning that 56 days, 4 hours and some-odd minutes have passed since I arrived in Bangalore. A lot of times I feel as though time is inching by, but then at other times, such as a few minutes ago when I realized that my last post in my blog had been a month ago, I feel as though time is flying. Now that I am past the halfway point, I am sure time will start to breeze by.

Anyway, I thought I would give a quick update on the events of the past month for the benefit of anyone interested as well as the benefit of my future self.

The event of this past month figuring most prominently on my mind right now is my having developed an allergy to Bangalore, Visthar or some combination of the two. I think it might actually be that I'm allergic to some part of the sheets, blankets or mattress that I sleep on at Visthar because whenever I sleep here I get massive bumps all over my body that look like mosquito bites that itch like crazy. On four occasions, one side of my lip has swelled to comic proportions as well (there are clearly other aspects of my appearance that could be considered comic in that picture as well...I had just woken up). Once I get my most recent pictures onto my camera, I will upload a picture from my most recent lip-swelling incident. The other side of my lip is the one swollen in that picture and it's about twice the size of the left side of my lip now. I would think that these bumps were just over-sized mosquito bites, but I have not been bitten by mosquitos and don't always itch. The bumps are always there when I'm in Bangalore, but they get much larger and itch like crazy when I'm sleeping. The result is that I sleep very little at Visthar. The best part of my vacation in Pondicherry was my ability to sleep all the way through the night. I wonder if the bumps on my body and the swelling of my lip are separate phenomena, though, because two of my lip-swelling adventures happened when I was away from Bangalore while the bumps are an exclusively Bangalore thing. Maybe the lip thing is a food allergy...hmm...possibilities!

Anyway, strange allergic reactions aside, let me provide a quick update on what I've been doing recently. Our second course, entitled 'Globalization and the Ethics of Development' (the first had been 'Identity, Resistance and Liberation') finished last week. To start the three-week course, we had a weeklong field visit. Half of the group went to Tamil Nadu (a southern state) while the other half went to Wayanad district in Kerala, another southern state. I was in the group that went to Wayanad. We mainly looked at issues of development. We had meetings with several tribal communities, one of which is being aided by an NGO-funded health project, another of which is at risk of being displaced by a useless dam the government has built. We also visited a variety of schools and healthcare institutions. Once we were back in Bangalore, we expanded on issues of globalization and development with a particular focus on how globalization affects development in the areas of health, education and agriculture through lectures and field visits.

We had Monday the 19th of October off from class because of Diwali and a lot of the group used that long weekend to go to Goa (a beach town) or on a safari in Kerala. I was one of three who chose to stay behind. I had a fun and relaxing weekend highlighted by dinner and fireworks at the house of David (Visthar director) one night and a performance by the Bandhavi girls another. I was responsible for writing the class blog the week that ended with Diwali. You can read it here if you are interested: http://cice.blog.gustavus.edu/.

It is now late morning on Thursday here. Nadeau and I got back from Pondicherry (see previous post) very early yesterday morning. The rest of the group will be getting back from their various break adventures on Friday and Saturday. I need to use this extra time to think about a final project for the semester. I still don't know what I want my project to address. It is important that I decide now because on Sunday, we will be leaving for a month-long journey to North India and we won't have much access to the internet or to books, so I need to bring some of those resources along with me so that I can start work on that project.

We will get back from the North on December 2nd, and the last two weeks here will be a frenzy of preparing and presenting final projects and papers for the final course on Religion and for the final project for the semester before we leave for home early in the morning on December 17. I miss home dearly, but I am sure that once I am back, I will wonder where my time in India went.

I got lost. again.

This week is mid-semester break, so we have no classes. We were allowed to travel the country in groups of at least two. Most of the class went North to the Himalayas and the Ganges, but I wanted to go to a city, so I accompanied my classmate Brendan to Pondicherry, a city with heavy French influences in the southern state of Tamil Nadu that he really wanted to see. It is the home of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram as well as the international township of Auroville, both of which draw huge numbers of foreigners. Other than those two main draws, Pondicherry, undoubtedly a pleasant city to live in, has little for tourists to do.

On our fourth and final day in Pondicherry, we checked out of our hotel at noon but our bus was not scheduled to leave until ten and a half hours later, so we left our stuff in the hotel's storage room and headed out for one last day on the town. Nadeau and I decided to split up and meet again for dinner. I milked as much time as I could out of my visit to Coffe.com, a cute little coffee shop, but when I felt I had overstayed the welcome I had earned by purchasing a 20 rupee (40 cent) bottle of water, I decided to check out Bharati Park, a large park that we had passed while walking around on each of our previous three days in Pondicherry. In order to make sure I had a proper sense of direction, I walked first to Daily Bread, the restaurant where I had agreed to meet Brendan for dinner. From there, I walked in the general direction of the park. I paid very close attention to the path I took and was delighted to find the park on my right hand side after only having to turn left once at a tall-building that I had carefully noted in my mind. Not only had I avoided getting lost on my way there; I was confident in how I had gotten there and was sure that I would not need to walk in circles to find my way back.

The park was great! Since it was the middle of the day on a Tuesday, it was relatively uncrowded, so I enjoyed the book I had brought along in peace. It had taken me about ten minutes to walk from Daily Bread to the park, but, to be safe, I put my book away and headed back at 5:10, twenty minutes before I was scheduled to meet Brendan. I turned left on the street that bordered the park from where I had first seen it and started walking. I immediately became aware that the street I was walking down did not look like the one I had walked up to get to the park. It was starting to get dark now, though, so I wrote this off. I had made a careful mental note of the route I had taken to get to the park and I was sure that I was now returning the way I had come; my memory of the shops on the street was clearly the faulted one. I kept walking, looking for the tall building that would be my cue to turn right. It did not come and soon I found myself passing cobbled streets full of children speaking French to each other. Upon closer look, these mostly-light brown haired students were French students speaking French to each other. I looked at the buildings around me. Many of them were adorned with simple archways and sunken back windows: I had fallen into France. No, I definitely had not walked this path on my way to the park.

Despite being absolutely sure that I had turned the right way to get back to Daily Bread, I had to resign that I was now absolutely lost. I wandered around aimlessly for a bit, trying to look as though I knew what I was doing, when I ran into Rue Surcouf. There! That was a name I recognized. Unfortunately, it was a name I recognized from having eaten at Kasha ki Aasha, a small boutique/cafe that set on the end of it, a couple of days earlier. I looked down at my watch. 5:25. Hmm...well at least I knew where I was now: good two kilometers on the side of the park opposite the one I needed to be on. Beautiful. I increased my walking speed and headed off in the direction of Daily Bread, finally right about where I was headed. 5:30 passed and I was still six or seven city blocks from the place on Mission Street where I would turn onto Nehru Street, walk a block, then turn onto Ambour Salai, walk a block and arrive at Daily Bread. At home this wouldn't be an issue. I would call Brendan, tell him I was going to be ten minutes late and continue on at a leisurly pace. I was not at home and this was not an option and Brendan is not the type to assume that everything is hunky-dory when someone does not show up on time in an unfamiliar Indian city. I increased my walking speed again; I was now close to running, earning myself a lot of confused glances from other passers-by. Pondicherry's advertising slogan is "Give Time a Break". People do not hustle to get places in Pondicherry.

Finally I got to the Bata shoe store, my cue to turn left. I was nearing the end of the block on Nehru Street that separates Mission and Ambour Salai streets, when I saw it. It being a beautiful orange cloth purse. The zipper on the purse that I had gotten in Hampi a month and a half earlier had broken just that morning. This purse was calling to me in its radiant orange beauty. I was now less than a minute away from Daily Bread. I looked down at my watch: 5:07. I considered ignoring the purse and continuing on to save an undoubtedly anxious Nadeau from worry but ultimately decided the purse was worth rounding out my lateness to an even ten minutes. I wanted the purse for 100 rupees (2 dollars), but I had only managed to get it down to 120 when my allotted two and a half minutes for buying said purse were over. I decided that, in the scheme of things, forty cents wouldn't kill me and bought in anyway. I rushed up to Daily Bread just as the time on my watch switched from 5:40 to 5:41. As expected, Brendan looked anxious. It's funny because at home, being ten minutes would be no big deal. If Brendan had been worried, he would have texted or called me to make sure I was okay and life would continue. Amazing the kind of security just having a cell phone provides. Anywho, I apologized profusely, telling him I got lost (8/11 of the reason I was late, anyway).

Which brings me back to my original point: I am positive that turned the right way out of that park and yet I ended up going exactly the opposite direction of the one I wanted to go in. I have thought for a while about how this could have happened and have come up with only one possible solution. God knows that I am directionally-challenged. He knows that reversing directions causes a lot more strain on my brian that it should, so, he keeps a close eye on me and, on the rare occasion that I do correctly reverse directions, he flips the world so that I am still going the wrong way, ensuring that the "directionally challenged" label will stick with me for life. It really is the only plausible solution. Glad I got that one sorted out.