hostel life

I love living in a hostel. I love our little home. It is cute and quiet, a little sanctuary set back in the middle of a crazy crowded unapologetic city.

We usually eat breakfast and dinner here at the little cafeteria, however it isn't really a cafeteria because the young men that work her insist on serving us and our group of Americans are usually the only diners.
Once and a while there actually are other guests. Today Kali and Deepa and I ate breakfast with with an older man who is a pentecostal veterinarian hailing from Bangalore. He told us he was in town for a wedding at the catholic church in town. Then we started to ask him questions about being a veterinarian in Western India and the kinds of things he sees (we figured a man like that must have tons of stories about cool things he has done), but really he just wanted to proselytize to a bunch of American college kids. (Too bad Kali is Jewish and Deepa is Hindu and I pretended to get more dosa...). Anyway the pentecostal veterinarian will be back for another wedding in August so we might run into him again.

Another visitor to the CSI hostel is a med student names Thakara. I think she is Indian by birth but was raised in the UK, and is here in Chennai as part of a rotation for a premier med school in London. She is absolutely adorable and traveling alone so naturally we have adopted her into our little circle of students. So now Tharkia, the surgeon-in-training eats meals with is and tells us stories of about her practice at the Chennai city hospital. Which is generally too graphic for breakfast conversation but we are interested anyway. Plus she uses cool slang like "pop-in" and "narley".

My favorite time of day at the hostel is in the evening after everyone returns from their various teaching assignments all over the city. After people eat dinner and shower the days pollution off, its nice to sit in an air conditioned room and chill out.
In some ways, it feels a lot like summer camp. We have no tv and no readily available internet. (And if there was tv, we wouldn't watch it because in India, shows are corny and in Tamil). So we spend our time doing other things that get forgotten about in college lifestyle. A few kids brought guitars with them, and last night I was treated to a few Jack Johnson numbers by some people who surprised me with their singing ability.
I also have gotten a lot more time to read, which has been nice. I was glad to see so many people brought stacks of books with them, so when I finish a book we just trade around for something interesting. We have a nice little book club going on as well. Currently everyone is reading Eat Love Pray by Elizabeth Gilbert (I just finished). The reason everyone is nuts for this book is because the woman spends a few months in India and writes about her reactions and the things she sees, and much of the book closely mirrors what we are going through here (it's kind of eerie actually...).

Tonight, however, our activity for evenings entertainment is poster-making. We start teaching at a new school tomorrow and we are preparing lessons for a ninth standard class (12 and 13 years old). It is an English-medium school which means everything is taught in English, so our translators can take a break. It is also government school; everyone that goes there are children of military and governments families. This means they should we well behaved, but here nothing is certain. I'll tell a little more about our teaching experience next time. Every place we go is so different and we have to learn to be very flexible depending on the level of English, number of students, and their prior knowledge of bio and anatomy.

This weekend, however, I am going to Ooty. Neelys family lives there and he is taking a bunch of us to go visit. We are going by sleeper train and leaving tomorrow after classes are out. I am SO excited because Ooty is a mountain town that is usually much cooler than the city and it is also famous for it's tea and beautiful temples (I might never want to leave!)

-S