8/4/08 Madelin room St. Spephens hostle.

I'm now sitting on my new bed in my new room which I have dubbed the "Madelin room". It looks just like the room in that madolin cartoon with that girl living in a catholic orphanage. 20 foot ceiling with 2 rows of 5 beds (not from this entry, but since there are 10 beds for 3 people, I've moved beds 5 times since I've been here).

I came to india with pretty low expectations of how the bathrooms would be, but then I got to my room (old room) and saw a shower and a wonderful all to taken for granted, western toilet! Having a shower was so refreshing with all the humidity getting you sticky. I was taking quick showers twice a day. They shouldn't have spoiled me.

When they moved us to this room, I had my guard down so I was utterly disappointed to fine no shower. but there is a sink and a western toilet..... that don't have water running to them. so every time someone uses the bathroom we have to run outside, fill up a bucket with water, then carry it back and pour it in the toilet to flush. The worst part is that I was SOO ready for MUCH worse a situation and then they spoiled me with the other room... ha.

One of the rules we agreed to was to "not speak in our mother tongues in front of others that cannot understand it" excluding English and Hindi. The rule is mainly because it's a little rude, people think you're talking about them and using your tribal tongue to make sure you can't hear the bad things your saying. there are 16 people in the class, from 12 different parts of India each one knows 4 or 5 languages and they differ from person to person. I figure we have anywhere from 20 to 40 languages between all of us.

Mayang confronted me at dinner and asked "do you and Andy speak any other language besides English?" I told him that I speak a little Spanish and Andy probably speaks a few European languages. "do you ever speak Spanish with each other in front of Alisha?" I told him that no, and that I speak very little Spanish and he could think of me as mono linguistic "ok, because Alisha says that you usually speak in a different language than English in front of him". He can't understand my english. Right after that Yuraj asked me if I thought I had a very think accent. "no I don't think so". It turns out that we do have an accent, and he said people from California and New Zealand have the hardest accents to understand. We say "budder" instead of "butter" and "cenner" instead of "center" and "wadder" instead of "water". they could understand Andy perfectly though because the british are very persice (and ruled them for 300 years). I have to talk like Dwight Schrewt from The Office for some of them to understand (or under-sdand) anything I say. It's kinda fun

Turns out that not only can I not speak hindi, but I can't speak english either