Host Family

Rachel and I wore our new outfits to meet our parents.

It's official! I'm now with my host family in their two-bedroom apartment about 15 minutes from the program center where my classes are. The father's name is Adil and he is an English literature professor at a nearby university, and the mother is named Khadeejah and she works for BBC. Their 7-month-old daughter is named Iman she is the quietest little baby I've ever met. She's adorable and curious and I'm really excited to see how she grows while we are here.

I'm staying with a girl named Rachael. I think both of our host parents still don't quite know what to do with us because they've never hosted before, but we had a delicious meal tonight and talked about economics and child rearing and mosquitos. The SIT people (Bhavna is in charge of homestays but we heard this from everyone) kept telling us about how good Khadeejah's cooking is, and they were right. It was a little spicy for me tonight (as in I ate everything with yogurt, which they call curd, and drank copious amounts of water to cool the lip-burning sensation) but I tried to tell her it was ok, because I want to build my spice tolerance. She could tell I was struggling though and said tomorrow would be less spicy.

This is our bedroom (and shared bed) at our new home!

Adil's brother-in-law visited and we had an impromptu Hindi lesson, which was fun. I now can say some basic phrases, like "How are you?" and "The food is good" and "We are learning." Tomorrow I think Rachael and I are going to go to the Lotus Temple, India Gate, and perhaps to see a Bollywood movie in theaters! We watched one, called Three Idiots, at the program center the other day and I actually liked it a lot. All Bollywood movies are really long (like three hours), but this one had a pretty good plot and it was an emotional roller coaster ride. I recommend it if you're going to try watching a Bollywood movie for the first time. Perhaps my next post will be about all of the crazy Bollywood music videos we see on TV all the time! Ludacris even has a guest appearance in one of them. They all seem to take place at a club or a wedding, and often they have blonde women dancing seductively in the background because apparently all western women are thought to be loose/of dubious moral character. I'm sweating up a storm right now despite the fans, so I think I'm going to move into the bedroom where it's cooler. More coming soon though!

Update: There is some kind of whistling/stick-hitting-something/alarm noise going on outside constantly, but it seems to have just subsided as I type this. Also I just ate a sour gumball (thanks Rachel!) off the ground of my room so hopefully my immunity to Indian germs will increase!