It's been a while

Wow- I just realized that I haven't written in a while, so it's about frickin' time, right?

Hm... What have I been up to in the past week or so? Well, last weekend I went on a quest to find a yarn store in Hyderabad with my friends Batia, Rachel and Becca. It was quite a journey. We took an autorickshaw to Lingampalli where we hopped on a train, which goes around the city like a subway, to get to where we wanted to go to in the city. The ride on the train took about an hour, and we got to view the city from a very different perspective, which was nice. Batia had google-mapped the directions to the yarn shop from the Kachiguda Train Station, and we followed them quite well to where we thought that the shop should have been. When we didn't find it we asked for directions in two different stores, and in the second store one of the guys ended up taking us to where it was. I doubt that we would've have found it otherwise. Finding anything here takes a lot of effort. It feels like such a triumph when you actually find what you're looking for. I bought two different types of yarn, and I crotched a hat for myself. (I'll post a photo of it later if I can).

I had a lot of fun this weekend as well. I went to a place called "Shilparamam," which is this "craft village" where all of these local artisans sell their wears. I bought a 100% pashmina shawl and some beautiful fabric to make another salwaar kameez out of. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Then in other exciting news, two of my friends here are major singers, so we spend hours last night and this afternoon singing madrigals together. We're planning on trying to learn a new madrigal each week and performing at the end of the semester. I love it because I haven't sung like that since high school. I didn't realize how much I missed singing in small vocal groups until last night when we were harmonizing together so beautifully. I'll let you know how it goes. I was thinking about recording us on garage band one day and posting it on the blog so you can hear what I've been up to.

Tabla lessons are going really well, so well that I prefer practicing over doing homework and such. It's funny because so far I've preferred doing everything but school work, and I'm not really freaking out about the fact that I'm not doing a ridiculous amount of school work. First of all, the academic system here is so different that it doesn't seem to expect much out of you, and much of what I've experienced so far, i.e. the lectures and assigned readings, has been really boring. They're system doesn't really seem to value active learning as much as we do back in the states. For example, I would rarely go to class/discussion group without having done the reading, but here, you either aren't even expected to do all if any of the readings, and when you do, it doesn't matter because the lectures may be structured so that they just summarize the article you should have read for the class. Needless to say, I'm not as excited about my classes as I was in the beginning. I do like my Hindi class though, but that's probably because there's only three of us and it's very interactive with homework every night.

Also- I played soccer last night. My friend Siury and I were the only girls out there (surprise, surprise), and we totally kicked butt! I stole the ball from the opposing team at least 4 or 5 times. My team won 4-0.