My host mother has been out of town since before I got back from Varanasi, so it's just me & my host sister in the house. It's given us a lot more opportunities to talk and to bond with one another...we've cooked dinners (& breakfasts...Dosa pancakes mmm) together, which I've really enjoyed.
Last night before temple (and after meeting/tickling the feet of an ADORABLE two-month-old baby named Neda that apparently lives behind me), my sister tells me that we don't have any food for dinner, so we'll stop by the market to get vegetables quickly. For some reason I believed that this would actually be a quick outing - have I learned nothing in the past two months? - and we set out (after a neighbor dropped in for a quick chat, and after I changed my pants from leggings to looser sawar pants, at the instruction of my sister, to deter potential harassment) to buy vegetables.
But wait! We were almost out of petrol. So after a brief detour to the petrol station in the opposite direction, we were actually off. I had no idea where we were going - I had kind of assumed that since we were in a time crunch we would just stop by a supermarket, but no. We went to a full-on fruit & vegetable market. Open air, tons of vendors, tons of people, lots of noise. It was GREAT. I loved seeing all the vendors with their fruits and vegetables laid out in front of them or on carts. We went through the whole market looking for the best quality of everything and filled our bags to their brims (Banana, Chikoo, Grapes, Cabbage, Okra, Capsicum, Eggplant, Papaya, Potato, and Tomato). It reminded me of the Moshi marketplace, but just for produce. I wish I had my camera...but it was probably for the better - having a bag to look after would've just made the whole process more difficult.
The best part? One of the vendors asked my sister if I was Indian.
The second best part? I could understand the gist of the conversations my sister and the vendors were having (and the same went for when the neighbor came over earlier). Even though understanding a language and speaking it are very different levels of comprehension and knowledge, I was really excited to realize that I actually have absorbed some Hindi in a meaningful way.
By the time we finished, it was about 8:50, and temple ends at 9. But we went to say hi to Sai Babba (and collect the box of treats they hand out at the end...reminds me of getting donuts after church) anyway.
It's weird that this is essentially my last week in Jaipur. On Sunday I'm night-training my way to Ahmadabad for my month-long ISP. Classes are over - we took our Hindi finals on Monday & Tuesday, and turned in our final ISP Proposals yesterday. The program threw us a going away party yesterday night too, this time on the deck of our program center. They put up all these colored lights, set off fireworks from the roof, and gave us McAloo Tikka burgers from McDonalds (again...surprisingly they tasted better this time though). I'm ready to go but I'm also nervous. Today in class we did some "stress releasing" activities where we said "HA" and threw our arms from side to side. It didn't really work, considering there were about 28 of us total in the classroom. Our academic director told us that she hopes we come back more empowered.
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