July 21st: Trying to Find a Routine

What's new? Everything. Everything is new and a little bit strange still. I have yet to go to school, or join any extracurriculars. Well, tomorrow I’m starting classical Indian dance lessons. I’m excited.

Other than that, it’s simply just me trying to figure out how to live and adjusting. I'm warming up to my family more and more, even though I feel like I'm offending my host mom because of my small, Canadian stomach. Honestly, I feel that every country in the world excluding Canada and the US is food based. Here (When I say here, I’m referring to India) you MUST accept food. All food. When you go to someone’s house they’ll offer you some almonds or sweets, and when your mother dishes out your food, you best believe you’ll be eating every single grain of rice. For meals at home, I am expected to eat at least two chapatti (naan…basically) and two large servings of rice. I try my hardest to eat all I can, while still not eating a lot.

My nights are extremely difficult. I cannot fall asleep and stay asleep for more than 10 minutes until 7:00am. The biggest thing to blame is jetlag of course. But besides jetlag, I have so many mosquito bites, right now I have 17 on my left foot alone. When I’m not scratching, I notice how sticky and gross I am. When I can put aside my physical state, I’m thinking about Canada, all the food and people I miss, my soft bed, silence and clean air. Mainly I think about the crazy situation I put myself in.

Hopefully jetlag will pass sooner than later, and that I’ll adapt to the temperature. I’m not sure how to make these mosquito’s to stop biting though… It appears my Canadian repellant is doing nothing.

I know it’s only been six days, but I know so many things that I want to learn. How to apply mehndi (Henna), cooking, dance, classical Indian singing, maybe even the sitar or tabla (Indian Drums), Hindi. But the main thing I want to learn is to be Indian. I want all of these new sensations to be normal. I want to wake up and not even think about how the lizard on my ceiling is different than what I know, or not even noticing all the noise around me. This world right now is nothing like what I know from London. To anyone in London, get out. Get out and see the world and all its glory.