It's Tuesday 1 December 2009. Last night, several visitors to the institute had a send off dinner and I went with them. Very nice people, all of them, and I hope to go visit their home institutes in the (nearish sort of) future. What this means is that I'm sort of out on my own now. I have been woefully lazy about getting a phone. I don't really have anyone to call, and I have a phone in my office, which is where I spend most of my day anyway.
What having westerns around afforded me was a small daily escape from south India. It's tough here to adjust on your own. I've certainly blogged about many things here which have given me trouble (strangely enough diarrhea hasn't been an issue at all). Now without the comforts of other westerners who are as clueless as I am, I've got to take my few intro lessons and start breaking out into India. Although, at this point things seem like they'll be ok. I'm working on my Tamil, but adjusting one's ears to the speed and inflection is difficult when all one's learning has been from books. I suppose my primary concern now is getting a viable mode of transportation.
Bicycles (which I knew as mitivandi or mitivandikal in plural) are simply called cycles here. I also find that people don't expect to hear tamil words out of my mouth, and so when I say things in Tamil, the native speakers don't recognize it. My accent is the weird one here. I'm picking up about a word a day, but I haven't been studying my grammar like I should. I did have an amazingly revelation about transport though. Since the trains stop running so early, I can simply walk on the tracks to my house. It's the most direct way over the river. I've seen literally hundreds over people down on the tracks (the electricity is generated by overhead power lines for the trains here).
Plenty more adjustments to make. Stay tuned, I'm sure my solo hilarity will ensue.
I'm working on collecting pictures of TERRIBLY translated English-Tamil and Tamil-English signs, once I get a collection I'll be sure to post them.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
ahhhh, mitivandi!!!
ReplyDeleteI like this one - it's short, but loaded!