Mussoorie

I finally made it out of Boston, spent a lovely night in London with my friend Ashley, had lunch with my friend Amanda (who had just returned from studying in China), and returned to Heathrow on Sunday afternoon. I met up with the other fellows on my flight and the 8 of us flew to Delhi. We spent the day walking around and looking at shops and had lunch in this fancy restaurant for about $5 bucks each. We spent the night in a hotel.

Early Monday morning we boarded a bus and spent the day driving to a learning center called SIDH just outside of Mussourie. It's in the foothills of the Himalayas. It was pretty terrifying driving up the winding roads in a big bus. You never know when a car, cow, goat, person, bike, or somethign completely random will be in the road. Drivers beep constantly here, to tell people to hurry up (even when sitting in traffic and cannot move), to warn others they are coming around a bend (so, nearly constantly while driving in the mountains), and, seemingly, just for fun. I'm finding being a passenger pretty scary, but the drivers seem to know what they are doing.

We are staying in dorms at SIDH. We are doing orientation, which includes sections on Indian history, American Jewish World Service policies (e.g. don't break the law in India), development, etc. We get 3 yummy vegetarian meals a day, as well as chai tea at breakfast and afternoon break, and lemon/honey tea at late morning break.

We arrived after dark on Monday. When I woke up and finally had struggled out of my mosquito net and found my glasses, I spent about an hour just sitting outdoors and staring at the beautiful, breathtaking mountains. Since we are in the mountains, it's pretty cool up here, unlike Delhi which was constant sweating weather, even at night.

I used my first squat toilet, which wasn't nearly as intimidating as it seemed. I'm taking malaria pills and applying bugspray twice a day. I took a couple of bucket showers, and this morning for some reason we had hot water, so I took a luxurious hot water bucket shower.

I am online now because we had a free afternoon and came to Mussoorie. We are here at SIDH until Wednesday, then travel back to Delhi for 4 days, then us Southerners travel to Hyderabad for language training.

I'm still adjusting to being here and being in the big group (there are 17 of us fellows, all Jewish American young adults who graduated college in the past 3 years). I think I'll be more settled once we arrive in my city and move into our flat.