Happy Birthday Krishna

We have tomorrow off to celebrate Krishna's Birthday. His birthday officially begins at midnight, so I expect to hear loud clammering outside on the streets starting at midnight. Part of the tradition of celebrating this holiday is building human pyramids to reach up to a clay pot that is suspended above the street. The person on top of the pyramid has to break the pot with his head, and prizes of up to 1, 2, or 3 lahk are given to the winners (a lahk is equal to 100,000 Rupis, 40 Rupis is equal to 1 USD, you do the math :-)). When Krishna was a boy, he used to love butter. To keep him out of the butter pot, his mother would suspend the pot from the ceiling. Krishna would gather his friends around to build a pyramid so that he could reach the butter. There is a boys team and a girls team from Welingkar competing in tomorrow's festivities, so look for pictures from that experience!

This past weekend I had a relatively low key weekend. Had a Micro Economics test on Saturday, and then spent the afternoon relaxing a little before heading out with the whole gang that evening to celebrate Stella's birthday. We went to a restaurant called Ttaxi (yes, it has two "t's") that served amazing Italian food that I thoroughly enjoyed, and then we headed to a bar called Wink. It was a fun night, and I enjoyed sitting next to and catching with some people I don't usually talk with. We got back to the hostel around 2 am (we always break the 11 pm curfew, but never get in trouble because we are the Americans and paying a lot more than the Indian students to live here), and had to wake the guard up for him to unlock the two gates and let us in. It's got to be a fire hazard... being padlocked into the hostel with a soundly sleeping guard. One of the girls mentioned feeling bad for having to wake the guard up... I questioned why he was sleeping on the job in the first place!

Sunday was a really slow day. I spent most of it in my room, working on researching possible employers, as well as enjoying some alone time watching a chick flick, While You Were Sleeping. I did run a few quick errands to make sure I got some fresh air, including picking up a container of steamed rice for dinner, and some pita for snacks for the week. I had a lot of trouble sleeping last night, so wound up not falling asleep until after 6:30 am... needless to say, I skipped out on my first class this morning because knew I would be no use sitting in a classroom and would have to make too much of an effort to open my eyes after each time I blinked.

After class today, we had Hindi class. In the six sessions we have had with our teacher, we have learned all the verb tenses, but we are all horribly lost. We have asked her to slow down so we can absorb everything we have learned so far, but I do feel bad since we are pretty dead by the time we have Hindi class. We are down to 5 in the class, but I hope we can all make it through December (hey, that's a song) so that we can speak Hindi to each other when we arrive back to Philadelphia and make everyone else jealous.

This evening we went to the largest auditorium in Asia, don't ask me to remember its name, I have it written down somewhere and I can say it, just not spell it, to see a Jazz Concert! It was a lot of fun, and great to hear some familiar music including a piece by Thelonius Monk, Caravan, When the Saints Go Marching In, A Train, and a few original compositions of the group. It was a quartet selected by the Lincoln Center in NYC and they were fabulous!! I will post some video from the concert, they were really quite amazing. We also sat behind 5 Americans, and that was very exciting. They all happened to be teachers at the American School of Bombay, so I hope to be in touch with them and have the opportunity to become involved with the school once my class schedule eases up in October. We walked through the streets of Sion, not a pretty sight, to head out to eat after the concert. We were all starving. I had personally only had a protein bar and three bottles of water, and by 9 pm my stomach was growling. My hungry stomach wasn't helped by a song they sang about "Mama's Homecooking" where the lyrics included sweet yams, macaroni and cheese, collared greens, corn bread... thanks buddy, realll nice bring those images to mind.

Dinner was good, but a little spicy for my tastes so I didn't eat too much. Now am back in the dorm and hopefully will catch up on some sleep tonight so I can enjoy Krishna's Birthday tomorrow!