i wanna be a small town girl

I think that the reason I've been getting a "cold" every other week is because of the pollution. Apparently, the fact that I spend a whopping total of 1 1/2 hours out on the streets every week - 15 minutes to and from my voice lessons three times a week - is enough exposure to the dust and pollution to make my throat and sinuses suck.

Remind me never to live in a big city ever agin.


Anyway, life otherwise has been good. I spent the night at Goodie Bhua's house on Wednesday and Thursday night, and then I went to her son and daughter-in-law's house to spend the night on Friday night. Then on Saturday I saw Harry Potter with their daughter Sahiba. It was very cute, but cut out a lot of the book.

I have to play the sitar composition I've been working on perfectly in my lesson tomorrow. Ugh. I have a lot of practicing to do.

Oh! On Friday morning I had a group sitar lesson with three of Dr. Mahajan's sitar students from Delhi University - two of them were third-years and one was a second-year. I talked to them a little bit and we exchanged contact info so maybe we'll hang out sometime or something. That might be cool. Two of them were from Mauritius, and one of them was a really good sitarist!

happy belated gurpurab

I finally found a place that has wireless internet in Delhi! woohoo! Right now, I'm at Goodie Bhua's house writing this on my laptop - I'm not online - and tomorrow I'll go over to the lovely Cafe Coffee Day, just walking distance from here, to get wifi.

Tuesday, November 15 was gurpurab, a Sikh holiday, for the birth of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhi. And on Tuesday morning, I sang a shabad at the GK II gurdwara for probably about a hundred people...! It went well, except I was really nervous. The speaker system was so loud - I don't know that I've ever heard myself sing so loudly before in such an large, reverberent space.

Other than that, life here is pretty normal. I was just practicing sitar for a little bit, doing the same little patterns over and over and over again. I'm not memorizing everything fast enough, so I need to practice a lot more and just repeat everything tons of times.

Monday was my friend Jasmine's 25th birthday, and she had a birthday dinner at Thai Wok, a very swanky rooftop restaurant in Delhi. We met up with all the same crowd of Bani's Sikh camp friends, the same friends of hers that I have been hanging out with on and off since I've been here. The restaurant is located pretty close to the Qutab Minar, one of the most famous monuments in Delhi, so the view of the Qutab was pretty sweet.

This weekend I was alone in the flat for the most part; it was nice to have some downtime. Tayaji and Tayiji (aka my uncle and aunt - my dad's older brother and wife) came for Diwali and Bani's birthday and then left to go back to Chandigarh last Thursday morning. (They live here in Delhi, in the apartment where I'm staying, but they have a house in Chandigarh that they want to sell but the guy renting it out won't leave.)

i've been here for too long

In my dream last night I was driving with somebody around Baltimore, but the steering wheel was on the right side of the car.

Also, at one point in the dream, I was sitting on a blanket with my sisters, and we were eating from a tray of pink-orange, massive kiwi fruit.

I haven't updated in a while, and some people are getting irked.

O sweet, right now, the schoolkids are having their band practice next door. (We live right next to a school.) So the sounds of bagpipes and drums just wafted into the room. (why bagpipes...?)

Diwali was last week, and it was pretty fun. I had so many social events to attend! Wow, I'm actually kind of busy here! On the evening of Diwali, I went to Goodie Bhua's for firecrackers and dinner with her family. Generally, on the day of and the days leading up to Diwali, people set off firecrackers and fireworks, like on Independence Day in the US. But over here, there aren't any laws against which kinds of fireworks you can use and where you can use them, so there is all kinds of sparkly stuff going off everywhere. It sounded like a battle. I heard that at the sites where the bombings occurred last weekend, people initially didn't think anything of the sounds of the explosions simply because this city is so accustomed to the sounds of fireworks this time of year!

There's not much else exciting going on... Bani's birthday was on Sunday, and so a bunch of us went clubbing Saturday night. We went to club Elevate in Noida; we got there around 12 and stayed until 4 or something and then hung out at a friend's house til 5:15. Despite the fact that all the music consisted of bad songs that were remixed to become even worse, it was actually really fun. (Can you guys believe that I haven't been to a good dance party in over two months...!?!?!)

I'm just about hitting the halfway point of my time here! crazy!