A Little Break

Well I am currently in Udaipur, loving it. I forgot how beautiful this place is. Christine and I are in a hotel that looks over Lake Palace Hotel, and the dried up lake. It's so funny to see jeeps driving around kicking up dust, and cows grazing on the lake bed. Hopefully at some point the lake will come back, and it will be even more beautiful than it is now.

This week went kind of well. I am still bored at Prayas with Dr. Gupta away and all. I still haven't had a research topic assigned to me yet by my NGO, and all attempts to talk about it before have been in vain. But Pallavi said that on Monday she and I are going to discuss what we want to do in detail, and work from there. Yay!

Wednesday was Republic Day, and Anjali came over to my house. She and I watched a movie on my computer, Bridget Jone's Diary, which is one of my favorites and something she had never seen. She squealed and giggled at Colin Firth, and it was so much fun to watch that movie with someone who had never seen it before. It also made me realize how much I miss my friends. Chittor is so claustrophobic! My world there is so small: Prayas and my family. PLUS, I have to be in before dark, which makes it even worse. I am definitely feeling stifled there at the moment, which is why I am in Udaipur visiting Christine hanging out with the other tourists and staying out late.

Anjali needed to run some errands after the movie, so she and I went shopping. Boy, was that a mistake. She will never take me with her again, because none of the shops would give her a good price. They wouldn't even negotiate at all. I felt bad, but she just laughed it off. One of the places she needed to go was to get homeopathic medicine for something, so went to the shop. Every question she asked in Hindi the shopowner answered in English. I don't know whether he thought the medicine was for me or whether he just wanted me to know what they were talking about, but it was really funny.

Thursday and Friday were uneventful days at Prayas. I spent more time with the girls and FINALLY got to the only internet cafe' in Chittor when the power was ON, so I could work. I was basically living everyday until today, when I came here. My host family is going to a wedding here, so I hitched a ride with them to Udaipur to see Christine. It won't be all play though, tomorrow I am going with her into the field for one of her focus group meetings. She is worried that lots of people will come, too many for her to handle, and so she hired another interpreter to come along and I will be leading along with her. I have never been to the village she works in, and I am looking forward to it.

I can't tell you enough what a relief it is to be here with her. Already, I feel a huge weight off my shoulders just by being in a place with so many strangers that look like me. When we are around the touristy places, I am just another face, not something to be stared or gawked at like in Chittor. With every passing day, sometimes I feel that I suppress more and more of who I am to get by here. Somedays I am completely normal, and other days its really hard to cope, for whatever reason. I definitely think that being here for this long is going to be (and already is) one of the hardest things I have ever had to do in my life so far.