Friday Jan 4 8:29
The past few days have been wonderful, though less exciting
than before. Alex and I spend our mornings in Hindi class with just our teacher, Virendra Ji, and us. He is a small old man with almost 50 years of
teaching experience, and the only way I know how to describe him is like an
ewok from Star Wars, the small bears with spears. He is short and fat, talks
with his mouth full, and almost falls asleep in class. The nasal nature of Hindi
makes the whole thing laughable. For four hours a day we learn, and learn some
more, then we eat out meals with him, so we learn more after that. He told us
on the first day that we would be learning about 24 words a day, but when we
counted after day 1 we were expected to know 80. That’s what happens in a two-person
class.
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| Alex, Virindra Ji, Vidiya Ji, and Me in Virindra Ji's nephews restaurant |
Virindra Ji also comes from the most accomplished family I
have ever met. He has a daughter teaching Hindi in Varanasi, and one teaching
at Cornell, and one at Stanford. His brothers export Christmas decorations to Crate
and Barrel, he has a nephew who runs one of Jaipur’s most popular and posh restaurants,
and another nephew who won a Mr. World modeling competition. It is pretty
overwhelming. For dinner two nights ago we went to his nephews restaurant, and
had the most amazing meal, as well as met a whole slew of relatives. This was a
restaurant you would easily see in the States, complete with a bar and a disco (we
went on a Wednesday so it was not open).
Two days ago we had our first field ethics class, where we
went to a local temple, and spent some time observing the crowds, coming up
with some sample questions that we could use for our independent study. While
the class was not exactly eye opening it was nice to just see normal Indian
going about their normal Indian business, as opposed to heading to a tourist
sight.
We have Hindi again in a about half an hour, and I have
words to learn, so this is it for now.
Single most heard phrase by an American in India:
- · One photo? Please, one photo?
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